Altogether the arrangement, which had continued from the time that Catherine Hilliard was eighteen, up to the present date when she was in her twenty-third year, had answered admirably. Mrs. Hilliard was the reverse of exacting, and she was even forbearing and indulgent where Catherine’s dissimilar tastes and habits were concerned. On Catherine’s side she was not so ignorant and abstracted in her want of knowledge of human nature and absorption in her own pursuits, as to be unaware how much colder and more forlorn a place the world would have proved to her, if Mrs. Hilliard had forgotten their cousinship and had not extended to the girl an older woman’s friendly protection, and given her a home with a member of her kindred. Catherine cherished in silence and reserve sentiments of gratitude and affection for her cousin Louisa, and was a good deal more under her influence than could easily have been supposed. But there was a hitch—what miners call ‘a fault’—between Catherine and ordinary humanity, the consequences of which were so plain that Fan Constable, who was not in the other girl’s confidence, could read them though she could not trace them to their source. Without near ties, without clear, positive duties—apart from the obligation to keep the ten commandments and lead what she understood of a Christian life, Catherine Hilliard was thrown back and in upon herself, which, unless as a discipline to teach her how insufficient she was for any achievement she really valued, seemed about the worst experience she could have encountered. She was like a plant withdrawn from the wholesome, common, out-of-door influences of sun, rain, wind, and a touch of frost, while the plant is at the same time subjected in one part of its cellular tissue to the strain of over-stimulus and over-cultivation. Though Catherine lived in a house full of lively movement, with many comers and goers, though she was on excellent terms with the house’s mistress and its circle or circles, the girl remained always like an unfamiliar visitor in what served her for a home. She was only in, not of, its circles. Catherine’s was largely an inner world of fancy and feeling; its scenes furnished by the vivid representations which she drew in her mind, of places and incidents met with in her books; its characters, ideal personages, ghosts and shades—goodly ghosts and heroic shades, no doubt, but destitute of the substantiality and warmth, and what is salutary even in the provoking contradictions, the piteous failures, the tough warfare of flesh and blood. There was a certain bloodlessness and fantasticalness about Catherine’s world, amidst much that was noble and sweet in it. She had an aching consciousness of a hollow emptiness about it, and not of a gaping void alone, but of a harsh discord between it and the actual world. She felt herself getting more and more fastidious and captious and—she feared—horribly selfish. She moped a good deal, as well as mused.