“You are my parents’ guest, Lady Kenilworth; I endeavor not to forget it,” was the reply. “What does she mean by that?” her guest wondered; she thought she meant some covert rebuke. She did not at all like the steady contemptuous gaze of this young woman’s tranquil eyes. “Oh, my dear, how dreadfully old-fashioned and formal you are!” she cried, with an impatient little laugh; and the daughter of the house thought her familiarity more odious than her rudeness. She perceived the impression she made on the young woman whom she meant to marry Ronald. “You see, I feel quite at home here,” she added by way of explanation. “Of course, you know it was my cousin’s house.” “I wonder you like to come to it,” said Katherine as she paused. “It must be painful to see it in the hands of strangers, and those strangers common people.” “How droll you are!” cried Mouse, with another little laugh. “I am sure we shall be great friends when we come to know each other well.” Katherine was silent; and Mouse, slightly disconcerted, bade her a brief good-night, and took her own way to the Bird rooms. For once in her life she had met a person whom she did not understand. “Ronald shall marry her, but I shall always hate her,” she thought, as she went to the Bird rooms. “However, everybody always hates their sisters-in-law, whoever they may be.” The young woman seemed intolerably insolent to her: so cold, so grave, so visibly disapproving herself; it was quite insupportable to have Billy’s daughter giving herself grand airs like a tragedian at the Français. But for her intention to make Ronald marry the Massarene fortune she would have expressed her surprise and offence in unequivocal terms. “Really, these new people are too absurd,” she thought, as her maid disrobed her whilst the chimes of the clock tower rung in the fourth hour of the morning. “Too infinitely absurd. They must know that we don’t come to their houses to see them; and yet they will stay in their drawing-rooms like so many figures of Tussaud. It is really too obtuse and ridiculous.” She was, however, too sleepy to reflect longer on their stolid obstinacy, or to decide how she should on the morrow best teach them their place. CHAPTER XV. “_Elle a du chic; elle a positivement du chic_,” said the Duchesse d’Avit to her friends, in her great astonishment at the appearance and manner of the daughter of the house. “It’s easy to look _chic_ when one’s got as good a figure as she has,” said one of the other ladies, rather crossly. “She does _look_ like a well-bred person, I admit, but I dare say the cloven foot will show in some way or another.”