eemed so clear in
my head that if I'd had a pencil I believe I could have written quite a
long chapter. When we're out on our drive I shall find us a house. A few
trees round it, and a little garden, a pond with a Chinese duck, a
study for your father, a study for me, and a sitting room for Katharine,
because then she'll be a married lady."

At this Katharine shivered a little, drew up to the fire, and warmed her
hands by spreading them over the topmost peak of the coal. She wished to
bring the talk back to marriage again, in order to hear Aunt Charlotte's
views, but she did not know how to do this.

"Let me look at your engagement-ring, Aunt Charlotte," she said,
noticing her own.

She took the cluster of green stones and turned it round and round, but
she did not know what to say next.

"That poor old ring was a sad disappointment to me when I first had it,"
Lady Otway mused. "I'd set my heart on a diamond ring, but I never liked
to tell Frank, naturally. He bought it at Simla."

Katharine turned the ring round once more, and gave it back to her aunt
without speaking. And while she turned it round her lips set themselves
firmly together, and it seemed to her that she could satisfy William
as these women had satisfied their husbands; she could pretend to like
emeralds when she preferred diamonds. Having replaced her ring, Lady
Otway remarked that it was chilly, though not more so than one must
expect at this time of year. Indeed, one ought to be thankful to see the
sun at all, and she advised them both to dress warmly for their drive.
Her aunt's stock of commonplaces, Katharine sometimes suspected, had
been laid in on purpose to fill silences with, and had little to do with
her private thoughts. But at this moment they seemed terribly in keeping
with her own conclusions, so that she took up her knitting again and
listened, chiefly with a view to confirming herself in the belief that
to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an
inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a
traveller's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so
rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true. She did her
best to listen to her mother asking for news of John, and to her aunt
replying with the authentic history of Hilda's engagement to an officer
in the Indian Army, but she cast her mind alternately towards forest
paths and starry blossoms, and towards pages of neat