When Stella was first able to appear out of the shelter of her father’s grounds for a walk, she was the object of a sort of ovation--as much of an ovation as it is possible to make in such a place. She was leaning on her sister’s arm and was supported on the other side by a stick, as it was only right a girl should be who had gone through so much. And she was very prettily pale, and looked more interesting than words could say, leaning heavily (if anything about Stella could be called heavy) upon Katherine, and wielding her stick with a charming air of finding it too much for her, yet at the same time finding it indispensable. There was nobody in the place who did not feel the attraction of sympathy, and the charm of the young creature who had been rescued from the very jaws of death and restored to the family that adored her. To think what might have been!--the old man broken-hearted and Katherine in deep mourning going and coming all alone, and perhaps not even a grave for the unfortunate Stella--lost at sea! Some of the ladies who thronged about her, stopping her to kiss her and express the depths of sympathetic anguish through which they had gone, declared that to think of it made them shudder. Thank Heaven that everything had ended so well! Stella took all these expressions of sympathy very sweetly. She liked to be the chief person, to awaken so much emotion, to be surrounded by so many flatteries. She felt, indeed, that she, always an interesting person, had advanced greatly in the scale of human consideration. She was more important by far since she had “gone through” that experience. They had been so near to losing her; everybody felt now fully what it was to have her. The rector had returned thanks publicly in church, and every common person about the streets curtsied or touched his hat with a deeper sentiment. To think that perhaps she might have been drowned--she, so young, so fair, so largely endowed with everything that heart could desire! If her neighbours were moved by this sentiment, Stella herself was still more deeply moved by it. She felt to the depths of her heart what a thing it was for all these people that she should have been saved from the sea.