ught by him for a penny
a piece from a man who used to stand with a tray of toys in Kensington
High Street, as Katharine had often heard her mother tell. Often she
had sat in this room, with her mind fixed so firmly on those vanished
figures that she could almost see the muscles round their eyes and lips,
and had given to each his own voice, with its tricks of accent, and his
coat and his cravat. Often she had seemed to herself to be moving among
them, an invisible ghost among the living, better acquainted with them
than with her own friends, because she knew their secrets and possessed
a divine foreknowledge of their destiny. They had been so unhappy, such
muddlers, so wrong-headed, it seemed to her. She could have told them
what to do, and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact that they
would pay no heed to her, and were bound to come to grief in their own
antiquated way. Their behavior was often grotesquely irrational; their
conventions monstrously absurd; and yet, as she brooded upon them, she
felt so closely attached to them that it was useless to try to pass
judgment upon them. She very nearly lost consciousness that she was
a separate being, with a future of her own. On a morning of slight
depression, such as this, she would try to find some sort of clue to the
muddle which their old letters presented; some reason which seemed
to make it worth while to them; some aim which they kept steadily in
view--but she was interrupted.

Mrs. Hilbery had risen from her table, and was standing looking out of
the window at a string of barges swimming up the river.

Katharine watched her. Suddenly Mrs. Hilbery turned abruptly, and
exclaimed:

"I really believe I'm bewitched! I only want three sentences, you see,
something quite straightforward and commonplace, and I can't find 'em."

She began to pace up and down the room, snatching up her duster; but she
was too much annoyed to find any relief, as yet, in polishing the backs
of books.

"Besides," she said, giving the sheet she had written to Katharine, "I
don't believe this'll do. Did your grandfather ever visit the Hebrides,
Katharine?" She looked in a strangely beseeching way at her daughter.
"My mind got running on the Hebrides, and I couldn't help writing a
little description of them. Perhaps it would do at the beginning of a
chapter. Chapters often begin quite differently from the way they go on,
you know." Katharine read what her mother had written. She might hav