Mrs. Trenchard did, of course, consider the possibility of Katherine’s marriage, but, if that ever occurred, it would be, she knew, with someone in the family, someone like themselves, who would live near by, who would worship Katherine but never interfere with her, who would give her children, to whom Mrs. Trenchard could be a delightful grandmother. This surrender the Gods might demand—it would need more than such a marriage to separate, now, Katherine from her mother. Mrs. Trenchard, like all unimaginative people, relied very strongly upon little facts and well-accustomed places and familiar family relations. She did not believe that Victoria Street would walk away or that the old woman (Mrs. Pengello, an ancient widow with a pension, two granddaughters and a cast in her eye) at the Garth post office would appear one morning as a radiant young beauty, or that her brother Timothy would go on to the music halls. Her world was thus a place of security, and Katherine was one of the most secure things in it. “Ah! Timothy, you’re wrong after all,” she would sometimes, in the watches of the night, think to herself. “Nothing can take Katherine from me now. You may be as right as you like about Millie and Henry. Katherine is enough....” She had, during these last years, been wrapped in with a strange, placid content: Millie had been at school in Paris: there was nothing inside the Trenchard fortress that spoke of the outside world. No secret spirit ever whispered to Mrs. Trenchard: “Are you not being selfish in keeping your daughter? You will die some day, and then she will have a lonely old maid’s life when she might have been so happy. The children’s lives are their own. What right have you to Katherine’s life and ambitions and love? Would you, in your youth, have given up your future for your parents? Why should she?” There was nothing that Mrs. Trenchard desired more than Katherine’s happiness. If Katherine had not loved her she would have let her go, but now ... Katherine’s life was bound up with hers so tightly that nothing, nothing could part them.... Then there came a night of fog, a stranger bowing in the doorway, and all the old days were dead. Mrs. Trenchard was still stunned, the fog was yet about her eyes, and in her heart was a dread that had not yet found its voice nor driven her to determine what she would do.... Meanwhile there was no one in the world who knew her. She did not know herself. Until now there had been in her life no crisis strong enough to force open that realisation. * * * * * One morning early in January Mrs. Trenchard said to Katherine at breakfast: “Will you come to the Stores with me this afternoon, Katherine? I have to buy some hot-water bottles and one or two other things. Two of them leak badly ... some hot-water bottles ... and I’d like you to help me.” “I’m lunching with Rachel, mother,” Katherine said. “But I’ll be back by three if that’s time enough.”