"It is very hard," she complained to herself when she had been home about a week, "that they should make it so much easier for me to be bad than good. All the same," she added, with a touch of her old defiant spirit, "I am going to be good, whether they like it or not!" CHAPTER XVII Ivingdon was one of those villages, common to the chalk district, that cease to possess any charm in the wet weather. The small ranges of round-topped hills which formed the only feature in the flat green stretches of country entirely lost the few characteristics they possessed, in the absence of sunshine, and presented neither charm nor majesty in the heavy grey atmosphere that surrounded them. The landscape appeared even less inspiriting than usual to Katharine, on a rainy day in the late autumn, as she plodded through the most squalid part of the village, and prepared to walk home through a kind of mist that had none of the exhilarating qualities of the stormy rain that always appealed to her. After four months of dull and virtuous renunciation, such a day as this was likely to hasten the reaction that had become inevitable. It was tea time when she reached the Rectory; and the aspect of the precisely arranged table, with its rigid erection of double dahlias in the middle, and the starched figure of Miss Esther at the head of it, completed the feeling of revulsion in her mind. "My dear," said her aunt, as Katharine flung herself into a chair, "have you no intention of making yourself tidy before we begin?" "My only intention is that of having tea as speedily as possible," replied Katharine. "If Peter Bunce, or any other depressing personage is likely to turn up, he may as well see me in my wet weather hat as in anything else. Besides, I rather like myself in my wet weather hat, in spite of the disapproval it has excited among the gods of the neighbourhood." She waited instinctively for the reproof that usually came as an accompaniment to her criticism of the neighbourhood; but Miss Esther for once was preoccupied, and allowed her to go on undisturbed. "Mrs. Jones has got another baby," continued Katharine. "That's the seventh. And Farmer Rickard seems to have seized the opportunity to turn her husband off for the winter. There positively isn't another scrap of news,--so may I have some tea?" "Talking of babies," observed the Rector, looking up from his book, "I heard this morning that some one was going to be married. Now, whoever could it have been, I wonder!" "I didn't know," said Katharine, "that any one was left to be married in this village, above the age of sixteen."