"No, dearest! He was their riding master--I suppose that isn't much better, really. But he was an extremely handsome man--really stunning. Carry Winchester's mother forbade her taking any more lessons because _she_ was so wild about him, and Annie told me once that that was why Ida Burnett was popped into a boarding school. He was big, and dark, and he had a slight foreign accent, and he was ever so much older than Annie--forty, at least. She began to spend all her time at the riding club; it used to make Mama wild--especially as Annie was so headstrong and saucy about it! Poor Mama, I remember her crying and complaining!" "And how long did this go on?" Christopher asked. "Oh, weeks! Well, and then one hot day, just before Easter vacation it was, I remember, I came home early from school with a headache, and when I reached the upper hall I could hear Mama crying, and Annie shouting out loud, and this Kate--this very same Kate Sheridan!--trying to quiet Mama, and everything in an uproar! Finally I heard Annie sobbing--I was frightened to death of course, and I sat down on the stairs that go up to the nursery--and I heard Annie say something about being eighteen--and she was eighteen the very day before; and she ran by me, in her riding clothes, with the derby hat that girls used to wear then, and her hair clubbed on her neck, and she ran downstairs, and I could hear her crying, and saying to herself: 'I'll show them; I'll show them!' And that was the last I saw of her," Alice finished sadly, "for almost two years." "She went out?" Christopher asked. "Yes; she slammed the door. Mama fainted." "Of course!" "Oh, Chris," said his wife, half crying, "wasn't that enough to make any one faint?--let alone Mama. Anyway, she was dreadfully ill, and they rather shut me up about it, and told everyone that Annie had gone abroad. We had been living very quietly, you know, and nobody cared much what Annie did, then. And she really had gone abroad, she wrote Mama from Montreal, and she had been married to Emil Müller in Albany. They had taken a train there, and were married that same afternoon. They went to London, and they were in Germany, and then--then it all broke up, you know about that!" "How much later was that?" Alice considered. "It was about Christmas time. Don't you remember that I went to your mother, and Acton and I got measles? Mama was abroad then." "And this Kate went with her?"