Except the archduke who insisted on becoming a skipper of a timber-brig, so infuriating and insensate a flying in the face of a fair fate had never been known. Katherine Massarene for her part did not enter, or try to enter into his feelings, as no doubt it should have been her filial duty to do. She had some of his stubbornness, and a pride of her own kind which made her unyielding. Her numerous teachers, male and female, had all found her of unusual intelligence and she had studied the classics with ardor and thoroughness. She could say extremely caustic and witty things, but she generally was merciful and forbore to say them. She had a vast reserve of sound and unusual knowledge, but she endeavored to conceal it, disliking all display, and being by nature very modest. As, little by little, she began gradually to understand the position of her parents, she suffered from it acutely. If she could, with a clear conscience, have done so, she would have liked to renounce all their wealth and grandeur and earn her own living, which she could have earned very well as a musician, or a professor of history or dead languages. She said so once to her father, on his arrival in England, and the rage of the taciturn, ruthless man was so terrible that her mother on her knees entreated her never to allude to such an idea. “You are all we have left,” she said, weeping. “Your brothers and sisters all died in that horrible West. You are the sole one he has to look to for bearing his name and glorifying his money. You are heir and heiress both, Kathleen. Has he slaved and spared and laid by thirty years and more only that the sole begot of his loins shall disgrace him as a menial?” “Rise up, my dear mother; we will not speak of it again,” said Katherine, a mere schoolgirl then of seventeen. “We might discuss and argue for ever, neither my father nor you would ever see these things as I see them.” And with great self-control, most rare in one of her age, she renounced her dreams of independence and never did allude again in any way to them. She soon perceived that whatever chance she might have had of influencing her mother, she had none whatever of moving her father: if she had stood in his way, he would have brushed her aside, or trampled her down; he had not made his money to lose the enjoyment of it for the quips and cranks of a crotchety child.