In other words, Lady Millicent’s children, albeit they did not openly either resist her authority or turn a cold shoulder to her tardy advances, were what is vulgarly called “no comfort” to her at this trying season of her life--a season when disappointment rendered still more unendurable to others a temper already none of the sweetest, and when consciousness of failure subdued a spirit that had hitherto risen proudly above the threatened ills of life. Perhaps, had Lady Millicent’s children been enabled to look within the heart that had at last begun to melt beneath the influence of maternal tenderness, their feelings might have been softened, moved by the knowledge that, in spite of bygone proofs to the contrary, they were nevertheless beloved; but no such fairy-gift being bestowed upon them, and it being a boasted peculiarity of Lady Millicent’s idiosyncrasy that she never betrayed to others the feelings that were making havoc in her breast, it followed that not only the son whose grief for his brother’s departure had first aroused her maternal sympathies, but that the daughters--the sickly Rhoda and the more spirited Katherine--should have remained in ignorance of their mother’s yearnings after affection, while, in a silence full of reproachful meaning, they brooded over the events of the past. Of the three who so often met together to talk in saddened whispers of their banished brother, of poor Sophy’s death, and, when Rhoda was not present, of _her_ failing health, her broken spirits, she who was the most rebellious, the least willing to submit to the gloom which death and failure had cast around their home, was Kate--Kate, the gay-hearted and the _insouciante_--Kate who had expected to marry, and had hoped to be happy--Kate, to whom the idea of a return, _in statu quo_, to the dulness and monotony of Gillingham was as a sentence of banishment to a desert land beyond the seas. And after all they did not return, at least for the _dead_ season, to Gillingham; for a medical opinion, demanded with an anxiety carefully hidden from her children, on the condition of Rhoda’s health pronounced that for the _chance_ of life it was absolutely necessary that before the autumn should set in Miss Vavasour must be in the sunny island where so many victims to east winds and defective lungs retire to die.