Sometimes, too, a more tragic, a more sickening, fear assailed her, when she thought of the possibility of her tyrant telling the truth, in boastfulness or in revenge, to her brother. It was not likely, but it was always possible; for she saw that in William Massarene, at times, temper--the savage, uncontrolled temper of the low-born man--got the better of good sense, of caution, and even of ambition. She could never be sure that it might not do so some day in her case, and that for the ruffianly relish of dragging the pride of the head of the House of Courcy in the dust, he might not throw to the devil all his cherished triumphs, all his hardly-bought distinctions. Happily for her Hurstmanceaux was almost always in the country, or on the sea, and the sight of him in London streets seldom tempted the fiend to rise in her gaoler. Meanwhile the London season came on and ran its course with its usual plethora of pleasure and politics, its interludes of Easter and Whitsuntide weeks, and its comings and goings of people, who could not live without running to Rome, flying to Biskra, shipping over to New York, and taking a breathless scamper to Thibet. Katherine Massarene came up to town in the spring, sorely against her will, and she went through the routine which was so wearisome to her, and rejected many offers of the hands and hearts of gentlemen with whom she had exchanged half-a-dozen sentences at a dinner-party or riding down Rotten Row. “Lord, child, what do you want that you’re so particular?” said her mother, who did not approve this incessant and ruthless dismissal of suitors. “I want nothing and no one. I want to be let alone,” replied her daughter. “As for the life of London, I abhor it, I am asphyxiated in it.” Suitors who might fairly have expected her to appreciate them solicited her suffrage in vain; she did not give them a thought, she abhorred them--everyone. She only longed to get away from it all and have finished for ever with the pomp, the pretention, the oppressive effort which seemed to her parents the very marrow of life. “Mr. Mallock calls this the best society of Europe,” she thought again. “If it be so, why does it all come to us to be fed?” Had she possessed the disposal of her father’s fortune she would not have fed it. Being obliged to stand by and see it fed, in such apparent acquiescence as silence confers, she lost all appetite herself for the banquet of life. Such slight cutting phrases as she permitted herself to speak were repeated with embittered and exaggerated emphasis in London houses until London society grew horribly afraid of her. But it concealed its fear and wreathed in smiles its resentment, being sincerely desirous of obtaining the hand of the satirist for one of its sons.