So much could hardly be said with regard to Catherine Hilliard and her surroundings, as she stood listlessly looking out of one of the long windows on the lengthening shadows falling across the lilac flowers of the rhododendrons, and waiting for her cousin coming in to afternoon tea. It might be because Catherine belonged to all time that she did not belong particularly to that room—in which, however, the window where she stood with its round table, heap of books, letter-case and blotting-book, work-basket, and Nankin jar holding a bunch of purple and pink and white pea-blossoms, constituted Catherine’s sanctum and private properties. Catherine Hilliard was a young orphan cousin of Louisa Hilliard’s, who, when she left school with a bare competence, had been invited by the mistress of the Meadows to share her establishment. Catherine had accepted the invitation on the stipulation that, in proportion to her more slender means, she should pay her share of the joint housekeeping. ‘Catherine is such a dragon of pride for a young girl,’ Mrs. Hilliard explained to anyone who had a right to be made acquainted with the details of the arrangement, ‘that I dared not propose to her to come and live with me and let me keep house for both. Yet she might have the sense to guess that her company is a boon to me, though she has little sympathy with my pottering commonplace ways, and lives in an intellectual world of her own. It is my single regret with regard to Catherine that she is a bit of a blue stocking.’ But though Mrs. Hilliard professed and half persuaded herself to believe the contrary, in reality she neither objected to Catherine’s contribution to the general expenses nor to the different line she took in society. Mrs. Hilliard’s hand was not so open that it had not its seasons and occasions of closing, and she did not care to run the risk, slight though it might be, of a rival in her special field.