she had kept
silence, but that now she meant to punish maman--to drive her from
London. And then"--the girl's lips trembled under the memory--"she came
close to me, and she looked into my eyes, and she said, 'Yes, we're like
each other---we're like our father--and it would be better for us both
if we had never been born--'"

"Ah, cruel!" cried Ashe, involuntarily, and once more his hand found
Kitty's small fingers and pressed them in his.

Kitty looked at him with a strange, exalted look.

"No. I think it's true. I often think I'm not made to be happy. I can't
ever be happy--it's not in me."

"It's in you to say foolish things then!" said Ashe, lightly, and
crossing his arms he tried to assume the practical elder-brotherly air,
which he felt befitted the situation--if anything befitted it. For in
truth it seemed to him one singularly confused and ugly. Their talk
floated above tragic depths, guessed at by him, wholly unknown to her.
And yet her youth shrank from it knew not what--"as an animal shrinks
from shadows in the twilight." She seemed to him to sit enwrapped in a
vague cloud of shame, resenting and hating it, yet not able to escape
from thinking and talking of it. But she must not talk of it.

She did not answer his last remark for a little while. She sat looking
before her, overwhelmed, it seemed, by an inward rush of images and
sensations. Till, with a sudden movement, she turned to him and said,
smiling, quite in her ordinary voice:

"Do you know why I shall never be happy? It is because I have such a bad
temper."

"Have you?" said Ashe, smiling.

She gave him a curious look.

"You don't believe it? If you had been in the convent, you would have
believed it. I'm mad sometimes--quite mad; with pride, I suppose, and
vanity. The Soeurs said it was that."

"They had to explain it somehow," said Ashe. "But I am quite sure that
if I lived in a convent I should have a furious temper."

"You!" she said, half contemptuously. "You couldn't be ill-tempered
anywhere. That's the one thing I don't like about you--you're too
calm--too--too satisfied. It's--Well! you said a sharp thing to me, so I
don't see why I shouldn't say one to you. You shouldn't look as though
you enjoyed your life so much. It's <i>bourgeois</i>! It is, indeed." And she
frowned upon him with a little extravagant air that amused him.

By some prescience, she had put on that morning a black dress of thin
material, made with extreme simpli