The only sensitiveness which Mrs. Hilliard betrayed as to her personal style, was that while she was by implication resigned to, nay, reasonably consoled for, the death of her husband, whom she had married after the shortest of wooings, and of whom she had not seen much during their brief married life, she continued faithful to her widow’s black, though it was twelve years since she had been a wife. At the same time she could not get over her cousin’s eccentricity of taste when Catherine could have fluttered so fitly, in every respect, in white or in the palest of pinks, blues, or primroses. For a girl to be addicted to sobriety in anything, before her time, was incomprehensible to Louisa Hilliard, save in the light of affectation, if not hypocrisy, on the girl’s part. But though Mrs. Hilliard did not believe much in most people—young or old, she had still faith in Catherine’s odd childish simplicity. ‘Have I kept you long waiting, my dear?’ asked Mrs. Hilliard as she subsided, buoyantly still, into her own low chair, and, untying her hat, tilted it unceremoniously, for greater coolness, on the back of her profuse brown hair. Her action made conspicuous, what was a marked feature in her round face, the great expanse of white forehead—round like the face itself, and big enough to have been, so far as size was concerned, the forehead of a sage, but so flat and smooth that, gazing on it, one felt tempted to doubt the fact of which there was no question, that Mrs. Hilliard represented a woman of rather more than ordinary intelligence. ‘Not very long,’ answered Catherine, with her slow, absent-minded mode of speech, dawdling as she spoke across the floor; ‘and though you had, you know it would not have signified,’ she added indifferently. ‘It always signifies if one interferes with another person’s comfort,’ said Mrs. Hilliard, lightly; ‘only you are too young to understand the value of that jewel of an English word, and I am bringing my excuse in my afternoon’s budget, Catherine.’ In their familiar household intercourse Mrs. Hilliard never abbreviated her cousin’s name, or played affectionate or mischievous tricks with it. This was not because Mrs. Hilliard was in the least like either of those dignitaries Fan Constable or the Vicar of Wakefield, who loved to be particular, who might choose to revenge themselves nobly on the base liberties taken, doubtless, with each in turn, when they were addressed as ‘Fan’ and ‘Dr. Prim.’ Mrs. Hilliard asserted that Catherine was ‘Catherine’ like her namesake of Sienna, therefore the elder woman could not presume to call the younger ‘Kate’ or ‘Kitty,’ though Mrs. Hilliard herself had never been anything else to her intimates than ‘Loo’ or ‘Looey,’ unless ‘Tom’ sometimes in the days of her youth.