Aunt Aggie, watching her, felt quite suddenly as though the firelight had leapt from some crashing coal into a flaring splendour, that something strange and unusual was with them in the room. She was not at all, like her sister Elizabeth, given to romantic and sentimental impressions. She seldom read novels, and cared nothing for the theatre. What she felt now was really unpleasant and uncomfortable, as though she had soap in her eyes or dropped her collection under the seat during the Litany. The room positively glowed, the dim shadows were richly coloured, and in Aunt Aggie’s heart was alarm and agitation. She stared about her; she looked about the room and pierced the shadows; she sewed a wrong stitch into the parrots’ tail, and then decided that it was Katherine’s eyes.... She looked at the girl—she looked again and again—saw her bending forward a little, her hands pressed together on her lap, her breast rising and falling with the softest suspicion of some agitation, and, in her eyes, such a light as could come from no fire, no flame from without, but only from the very soul itself. Katherine’s good-tempered, humorous eyes, so charged with common-sense, affectionate but always mild, unagitated, calm, like her mother’s—now what was one to say? Aunt Aggie said nothing. Her own heart felt for an instant some response. She would have liked to have taken the girl into her arms and kissed her and petted her. In a moment the impulse passed. What was the matter with Katherine? _Who_ was the matter with Katherine? It was almost improper that anyone should look like that in a drawing-room that had witnessed so much good manners. Moreover it was selfish, this terrible absorption. If Katherine began to think of herself, whatever would happen to them all! And there were Millie and her mother, poor things, chattering blindly together. Aunt Aggie felt that the business of watching over this helpless family did indeed devolve upon her. From that moment Katherine and the things that were possibly happening to Katherine never left her thoughts. She was happier than she had been for many months. But Katherine, in the days that followed, gave her curiosity no satisfaction. Aunt Aggie dated, in future years, all the agitation that was so shortly to sweep down upon the Trenchard waters from that afternoon when ‘Katherine’s eyes had seemed so strange’, but her insistence on that date did not at all mean that it was then that Katherine invited her aunt’s confidence, Aunt Aggie was compelled to drive on her mysterious way alone. She was now assured that ‘something was the matter’, but the time had not yet arrived when all the family was concerned in it.