The difficulties, to lay two heads together over, are so many, and the poetry which makes the heart swell is so akin to every emotion. She remembered suddenly a seat under one of the acacias where she had sat with him over this study. She had always had an association with that bench, but had not remembered till now that it flashed upon her what it was. She could see it almost without changing her position from the window. The acacia was ragged now, all its leaves torn from it by the wind, the lawn in front covered with rags of foliage withered and gone--not the scene she remembered, with the scent of the acacias in the air, and the warm summer sunshine and the gleam of the sea. She was touched by the recollection, stirred by it, emotions of many kinds rising in her heart. No one had ever stirred or touched her heart but this man--he, no doubt, more by her imagination than any reality of feeling. But yet she remembered the quickened beat, the quickened breath of her girlhood, and the sudden strange commotion of that meeting they had had, once and no more, in the silence of the long years. And now, again, and he in great excitement, strained to the utmost, his face and his movements full of nervous emotion, turning towards her once more. “Miss Tredgold,” he said, but his lips were dry and parched. He stopped again to take breath. “Katherine,” he repeated, then paused once more. Whatever he had to say, it surely was less easy than a love tale. “I came to England,” he said, bringing it out with a gasp, “in the first place for a pretence, to bring home--my little child.” All the mist that was over the sea seemed to sweep in and surround Katherine. She rose up instinctively, feeling herself wrapped in it, stifled, blinded. “Your little child?” she said, with a strange muffled cry. CHAPTER XLV. Mr. Sturgeon arrived that evening with all his accounts and papers. He had not come, indeed, when Lady Somers left her sister to entertain James Stanford and joined her husband in the room which he had incontinently turned into a smoking-room, and which had already acquired that prevailing odour of tobacco and whiskey from which Mr. Tredgold’s house had hitherto afforded no refuge. Stella had no objection to these odours. She told her husband that she had “scuttled” in order to leave Kate alone with her visitor. “For that’s what he wants, of course,” she said. “And Kate will be much better married. For one thing, with your general invitations and nonsense she might take it into her head she was to stay here, which would not suit my plans at all. I can’t bear a sister always in the house.” “It seems hard,” said Sir Charles, “that you should take all her money and not even give her house room. I think it’s a deuced hard case.”