Katherine looked up, and her eyes meeting her mother’s, the confidence that had been clouded ever since that fatal affair with the hot-water bottles seemed to leap into life between them. Mrs. Trenchard put out her hand, Katherine moved forward, but at that moment Aunt Aggie and Aunt Betty entered; breakfast began. “I believe,” thought Katherine, “Aunt Aggie waits outside the door and chooses her moment. She’s always interrupting....” The fact that there was now some restraint between her mother and herself was only emphasised the more by the feeling of both of them that an opportunity had been missed. And why, Katherine wondered afterwards, had her mother asked Philip? If he had been invited to come to them after Easter—but now, to go down with them, as one of the family! Was not this exactly what Katherine had been desiring? And yet she was uncomfortable. She felt sometimes now that her mother, who had once been her other self, in whose every thought, distress, anxiety she had shared, was almost a stranger. “It’s just as though there were ghosts in the house,” she thought. As she went to bed she was, for the first time in her life, lonely. She longed for Philip ... then suddenly, for no reason that she could name, began to cry and, so crying, fell asleep. She was much younger than everyone thought her.... Throughout the three weeks that followed she felt as though she were beating the air. Rachel Seddon had taken her husband abroad. There was no one to whom she could speak. She wrote to Philip every day, and discovered how useless letters were. She tried to approach Millie, but found that she had not the courage to risk Millie’s frankness. Her sister’s attitude to her was: “Dear Katie, let’s be happy and jolly together without talking about it—it’s much better....” There had been a time, not so very long ago, when they had told one another everything. Henry was the strangest of all. He removed himself from the whole family, and would speak to no one. He went apparently for long solitary walks. Even his father noticed his depression, and decided that something must really be done with the boy. “We might send him abroad for six months—learn some French or German ...” but of course nothing was done.