“It ought by rights to be milked on to the brandy,” said that good lady. “But that can’t be done here, though there are half a score of beautiful Alderneys standing on the Home farm only just to supply the house--and such a dairy, my dear! Chiny the walls is, and marble the floors. Only I don’t hold with their method of churning, and the wenches are much too fine. I showed ’em how to turn out butter one day, and I heard ’em say as I come away that my proper place was the kitchen! Well, good-night, my dearie; sleep well.” “Good-night, dear mother,” said Katherine with unusual tenderness, for she was not demonstrative, and her parents to her were almost strangers. “It is not her fault,” she thought, “if we are upstarts and interlopers in this place which Henry the Second gave the Roxhalls.” Then her great fatigue conquered her and, the brandied milk aiding, she fell sound asleep and slept dreamlessly until the chimes of the clock tower sounded eleven in the still, sunny, frosty, noonday air. Then she awoke with the sense of something odiously painful having happened, and, as she saw the withered bouquet of violets, which she had told her maid to leave, with her gloves and her muff on a table near, she remembered, and the words of Hurstmanceaux came back on her mind with poignant mortification in their memories. “How right he was! Oh, how right he was! But how merciless!” she thought, as she looked through the panes of the oriel window of her chamber out on to the white and silent park. She saw the huge old oaks, the grand old views, the distant mere frozen over, the deer crossing the snow in the distance to be fed. The bells of a church unseen were chiming musically. In the ivy beneath her windows two robins were singing in friendly rivalry. Above-head was a pale soft sky of faintest blue. In the air there was frost. It was all charming, homelike, stately, simple; it would have delighted her if--if--if--there was so many “ifs” she felt sick and weary at the mere thought of them, and the innocent tranquillity of the scene jarred on all her nerves with pain. It was late in the morning before she could summon strength to go downstairs, where she found her mother lunching alone in the Tudor dining-hall; her father had gone away early in a sledge to attend political meetings in an adjacent county, and the large house-party invited was not due for two weeks. “Who are coming, mother?” she asked. “Oh, my dear, I never know; I scarce know who they are when I see ’em,” replied the present mistress of Vale Royal. “Lady Kenilworth has arranged it all. She brings her friends.” Katherine colored at the name. “As she would go to the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo, or the Sanatorium at Hot Springs!” she said bitterly. “Well, I don’t know about that. She’d have to pay for ’em in those places,” said Mrs. Massarene seriously, not intending any sarcasm.