Henry’s thought, with all the simplicity that was in his real nature, was only of Katherine. Millie, although she loved her sister, was absorbed by the vision of life—dramatic, tragic, gay, sinister, rapturous—that was slowly being unfolded before her. What she would have liked would have been for both Philip and Katherine to have told her, minutely and precisely, how the affair appeared to them. How she could listen to them if they made her their confidante! Meanwhile she must content herself with Henry. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Do!... There are things I can do,” he hinted darkly. “Meanwhile, you just keep your eyes open and see whether he’s bad to Katherine. If he is we must stop it. That’s all that matters.” “I wonder what she was like—that other woman,” Millie said, not looking at Henry, but at her own reflection in his looking-glass, then, without another word to him, she turned and left the room. After she had gone he wondered whether he’d been wise to tell her. She had offered no advice, she had not even, he thought, been immensely interested, she had certainly been, in no way, shocked. “Girls _are_ queer” was his final reflection. When the bell began to ring, with its strange little questioning invitation, he suddenly thought that he would go to church. He sometimes found evening service, with its candles and old familiar tunes and star-lit sky, romantic and moving: to-night he felt that his restlessness and indecision must be influenced. He came downstairs, and found Katherine standing and staring through the little window to the left of the hall door. She started when she heard his voice, as though she had been lost in her own company. “I’ve got a letter for you,” he said, roughly. “From Philip. He’s gone out for a long walk until supper, and he said you were to read it before he came back.” He gave it her. She said nothing. He turned abruptly away, and faced his mother. She had on her black Sunday hat and was buttoning her gloves. “I’m going to church.” “Well,” said Mrs. Trenchard, “I think we shall be the only ones. Unless Katherine’s coming.” “No, I’m not coming,” said Katherine. He walked away with his mother, feeling self-conscious with her, as he always did, but to-night, whether from some especial sense of gloom, of dripping, wet trees, of wind and rain, or from some real perception of agitation in his mother, he felt a strong impulse of protection towards her. He would have liked to have put his arm through hers, to have defied the world to harm her, to run and fetch and carry for her, to help her in any possible way. He had felt this before, but he had never known how to begin, and he knew that any demonstration of any kind would embarrass them both terribly. Mrs. Trenchard said things like: