All the people for forty miles round were of the same opinion, and owed her a grudge for it. Roxhall had been a very popular landlord and employer; his tenantry and laboring folks mourned for him, and despised the new man who stood on his hearthstone. Quite indifferent, however, to the _voces populi_ she drove safely through the familiar gates and up the mile-long avenue as night descended, and went into the library, looking very handsome with her blue eyes almost black, and her fair face bright and rosy, from the chilly high winds of the bleak April evening. She pulled off her sealskins and threw them to one of her attendant gentlemen, and then walked forward to the warmth of the great Elizabethan fireplace. “Well, my dear woman, how do you like it?” she said good-humoredly to Margaret Massarene, as she drew off her gloves and took a cup of tea before the hearth where a stately fire was burning for its beauty’s sake: the great room was heated by hot water pipes. Margaret Massarene was in that dual state of trepidation, anxiety, offence, and bewilderment into which the notice of her monitress invariably plunged her. She murmured some inarticulate words, and glanced timidly at the bevy of strangers. But Mouse did not take the trouble to introduce her friends to their hostess; some of them were already acquainted with her, but some were not: all with equal and unceremonious readiness ignored her presence, and descended on the teacups and muffins and caviare sandwiches with the unanimity of a flock of rooks settling down on to a field mined with wire worms. “Always had tea in here in Gerald’s time,” said one of the men, staring about him to see if there was any alteration made in the room. “I don’t think you know my daughter,” Mrs. Massarene summed courage to murmur, with a nervous glance toward Katherine, who stood at the other end of the wide chimney-piece, a noble piece of fine oak carving with huge silver dogs of the Stuart period, and the Roxhall arms in bold bosses above it. Mouse, looking extremely like her brother, flashed her sapphire eyes like a search light over the face and figure of the person in whom she had by instinct divined an antagonist, and desired to find a sister-in-law. “So glad,” she murmured vaguely, as she put down her cup, and held out her hand with a composite grace all her own, at once charmingly amiable and intolerably insolent. Katherine merely made her a low curtsey, and did not put out her hand in return. “How’s Sherry and Bitters?” asked Lady Kenilworth, marking but ignoring the rudeness. “Amusing creature, isn’t he? Bored to death, I suppose, in India?” “It would be difficult, I think, for the most stupid person to be bored in India,” replied Katherine briefly. “Lord Framlingham is not stupid.” Lady Kenilworth stared. Then she laughed, as it was so very comical to find Billy’s daughter such a person as this.