Katherine went up to her mother’s room. She would catch her alone now for half an hour before tea-time, when many of the family would be assembled, ready for the news. With such wild happiness was she surrounded that she saw them all in the light of that happiness; she had always shared so readily in any piece of good fortune that had ever befallen any one of them that she did not doubt that now they too would share in this fortune—this wonderful fortune!—of hers. She stopped at the little window in the passage where she had had the first of her little personal scraps of talk with Philip. Little scraps of talks were all that they had been, and yet now, looking back upon them, how weighted they seemed with heavy golden significance. The sky was amber-coloured, the Abbey tower sharply black, and the low archway of Dean’s Yard, that she could just catch with her eye, was hooped against the sky, pushing upwards to have its share in the evening light. There was perfect quiet in the house and beyond it, as she went to her mother’s room. This room was the very earliest thing that she could remember, this, or her mother’s bedroom in the Glebeshire house. It was a bedroom that exactly expressed Mrs. Trenchard, large, clumsy, lit with five windows, mild and full of unarranged trifles that nevertheless arranged themselves. At the foot of the large bed, defended with dark sateen faded curtains, was a comfortable old-fashioned sofa. Further away in the middle of a clear space was a table with a muddle of things upon it—a doll half-clothed, a writing-case, a silver ink-stand, photographs of Millie, Henry and Katherine, a little younger than they were now, a square silver clock, a pile of socks with a needle sticking sharply out of them, a little oak book-case with ‘Keble’s Christian Year’, Charlotte Yonge’s ‘Pillars of the House’, two volumes of Bishop Westcott’s ‘Sermons’ and Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Wives and Daughters’. There was also a little brass tray with a silver thimble, tortoiseshell paper-knife, a little mat made of bright-coloured beads, a reel of red silk and a tiny pocket calendar. Beside the bed there was a small square oaken table with a fine silver Crucifix and a Bible and a prayer book and copy of ‘Before the Throne’ in dark blue leather. The pictures on the walls—they hung against a wall-paper of pink roses, faded like the bedroom curtains and the dark red carpet, but comfortably, happily faded—were prints of ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus’, ‘Crossing the Brook’, and ‘Christ leaving the Temple’. These three pictures were the very earliest things of Katherine’s remembrance. There were also several photographs of old-fashioned but sturdy ladies and gentlemen—an officer in uniform, a lady with high shoulders against a background of a grey rolling sea. There were photographs of the children at different ages. There were many cupboards, and these, although they were closed, seemed to bulge, as though they contained more clothes than was comfortable for