"There's reason for that poor girl's bitterness," said Mrs. Stainton when we were again alone. "A dozen years ago, in her first and second seasons out, a more charming creature it would have been hard to find--ingenuous, sunny tempered, a dashing, sparkling blonde beauty, full of Irish quickness and fun, and a favorite wherever she went. Unluckily she met Ward Cotterell--now one of the editors of 'The Phare'--then a radiant, double first, handsome, chivalric, but as poor and debt-laden as he was clever, and the pair fell desperately in love. Mrs. Dixon wouldn't let them call themselves engaged. She had crippled her own fortune, and Kate had sacrificed a great part of her own portion, to clear a spendthrift eldest son and brother of his difficulties, and start him afresh in Ceylon, so that aid on their part was impossible, and Cotterell, after a year or so's trying vainly in this and that direction, for an income, gave up the struggle, married an heiress, who paid his debts, brought him L40,000 then, and has inherited since L60,000, and within six months after his marriage had his place on the 'Phare' offered him, with a salary of L1,200 a year. 'What would I not have given a year ago for any sort of hard work that would have made me sure of L500 a year?' he said to some friend who knew the little story. "Poor Kate kept up pretty well. 'What else _could_ he do?' she always says. 'He had no income, and mine would have barely given us shelter.' But she refused offer after offer for years. Now, when she finds admiration less freely forthcoming, and is utterly weary of everything she has tried, or believes is in store for her, I dare say she fancies she regrets the lost chances, but she's too genuine to make a _mariage de convenance_, let her talk as cynically as she will. "As for Cotterell, he hasn't a money anxiety in the world, and is reckoned one of the most brilliant leader writers in London; but his wife is the most commonplace woman alive--no more a companion to him than a housemaid would be; and Cotterell's not one of the clever men who like women to be pillows, and pillows only. He has given up society, save that of men, almost entirely; lives in his study and his room in the 'Phare' building, and his talk, when one meets him, is a mixture of fatalism and wormwood, depressing to the last degree. No hero he, and yet his fate has plenty of compensations that Kate's lacks--power, work, and two or three children that have inherited his wit as well as his handsome looks.