fully into, but which interested her much in bits, and amused her, and to which she lent a very willing ear. Sometimes the door of the room would be opened, and Kate would hear the footsteps in the house of which she was now a recognised inmate, but which she knew nothing of. There was one solemn step that creaked and went slowly, gravely, up and down stairs, as if life were a weighty ceremonial to be accomplished very seriously, which was evidently t{22}he step of Dr Mitford, the Rector of Fanshawe Regis, and rural dean; and there was a lighter springy masculine foot, which came to the very door sometimes with flowers and letters and books for the invalid, and which Kate did not need to be told was “my John.” In the languor of her illness, and in the absence of other objects of interest, this step became quite important to Kate. She was not, we are obliged to confess, by any means a very good young woman. She was a spoiled child, and she had been born a flirt, which could scarcely be said to be her fault. From three years old to nineteen, which was her present age, it had been the occupation of her existence to prey upon mankind. Whether it was sugar-plums she played for or hearts had not mattered very much to her. She had put forth her wiles, her smiles, her thousand little fascinations, with a spontaneous, almost unconscious, instinct. It was necessary to her to be pleasing somebody—to be first in some one’s regard, whoever that some one might be. Before she had been half a day under Mrs Mitford’s care, that good soul was her slave; and when that i{23}nnocent little bit of captivation was complete, and when the doctor, too, showed symptoms of having put on her chains, Kate felt her hands free, and longed for the hunting-grounds and the excitement of the sport. John was the most likely victim, and yet she could not get at him, being chained up here out of reach. It filled her invalid existence with a little touch of excitement. She sent him pretty messages in return for his roses, and listened to all his mother’s stories of him. Not that John in himself interested the girl. He was her natural victim, that was all, and she smiled with a vague satisfaction at thought of the mischief which she knew she could do.
It
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The life she lived in her room in this strange house of which she knew nothing, yet with which she was so familiar, was the strangest amusing episode to Kate. After the first two days Mrs Mitford kept by her less closely, and a fresh country housemaid, full of wonder and sympathy and admiration for the pretty young lady, came into the
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