It was with the most tremendous exertion that the party at last was disembarked, the little boy still on his father’s shoulder, the baby in the arms of the ayah. The countless packages and boxes, which to the last moment the aggrieved and distracted maid continued to pack with items forgotten, came slowly to light one after another, and were disposed of in the train, or at least on shore. Stella had forgotten everything except the exhilaration of knowing that she had come into her fortune as she made her farewells all round. “Oh, do you know? We have had great news; we have come into our money,” she told several of her dearest friends. She was in a whirl of excitement, delight, and regrets. “We have had such a good time, and I’m so sorry to part; you must come and see us,” she said to one after another. Everybody in the ship was Stella’s friend. She had not done anything for them, but she had been good-humoured and willing to please, and she was Stella! This was Katherine’s involuntary reflection as she stood like a shadow watching the crowd of friends, the goodbyes and hopes of future meeting, the kisses of the ladies and close hand-clasping of the men. Nobody was so popular as Stella. She was Stella, she was born to please; wherever she went, whatever she did, it was always the same. Katherine felt proud of her sister and subdued by her, and a little amused at the same time. Stella--with her husband by her side, the pale baby crowing in its dark nurse’s arms, and the little boy clinging round his father, the worried English maid, the serene white-robed ayah, the soldier-servant curt and wooden, expressing no feeling, and the heaps of indiscriminate baggage which formed a sort of entrenchment round her--was a far more important personage than Katherine could ever be. Stella did not require the wealth which was now to be poured down at her feet to make her of consequence. Without it, in her present poverty, was she not the admired of all beholders--the centre of a world of her own? Her sister looked on with a smile, with a certain admiration, half pleased with the impartiality (after all) of the world, half jarred by the partiality of nature. Her present want of wealth did not discredit Stella, but nature somehow discredited Katherine and put her aside, whatever her qualities might be. She looked on without any active feeling in these shades of sentiment, neutral tinted, like the sky and the oily river, and the greyness of the air, with a thread of interest and amusement running through, as if she were looking on at the progress of a story--a story in which the actors interested her, but in which there was no close concern of her own. “Kate!” she heard Stella call suddenly, her voice ringing out (she had never had a low voice) over the noise and bustle. “Kate, I forgot to tell you, here’s an old friend of yours. There she is, there she is, Mr.----. Go and speak to her for yourself.”