e knelt down--her tall, slender
figure, angular, more like that of a youth, than like that of a maid,
in her spare mud-stained habit and coat. Impulsively she put her hands
on Lady Calmady's hips, laid her head in her lap.

"Have you but one blessing, oh! my more than mother?" she cried. "Do we
count for nothing, all the rest of us--your household, and tenants rich
and poor, and Julius the faithful, and Ludovic the bland, and that
queer lump of sagacity and ugliness, John Knott? Why will you kill
yourself? Why will you die and leave us all, just because one person is
perverse? That's hardly the way to make us--who love you--bear with and
pity him and welcome him home.--Oh! I know I am treading on dangerous
ground and venturing to approach very close. But I don't care--not a
hang! We're at the end of our patience. We want you, and we mean to
have you back."

Honoria raised herself, knelt bolt upright, her hands on the arms of
Lady Calmady's chair, her expression full of appeal.

"Be kind to us, be kind," she said. "We only ask you, after all, to eat
and drink--to let Clara take care of you at night, and I'll do so by
day.--And then, when you are stronger, you must come away with me, up
north, to Ormiston. You have not been there for years, and its gray
towers are rather splendid overlooking that strong, uneasy, northern
sea. It stirs the Viking blood in one, and makes that which was hard
seem of less moment. Roger and Mary are there, too--will be all this
summer. And you know it refreshed you to see them last year. And if we
go pretty soon the boys will be at school, so they won't tire you with
their racketing. They're jolly monkeys, though, in my opinion, Godfrey
wants smacking. He comes the elder-brother a lot too much over poor
little Dick.--But that's neither here nor there. Oh! it's for you to
get out of the backwater into the stream, ten times more than for me.
Dearest physician, heal thyself!"

But Katherine, though deeply touched by the loving ardour of the
younger woman's appeal, and the revelation of tenderness and watchful
care, constantly surrounding her, which that appeal brought along with
it, could not rouse herself to any immediate response. Sternly,
unremittingly, since the fair July night when Richard had left her
nearly five years earlier, she had schooled herself into unmurmuring
resignation and calm. In the prosecution of such a process there must
be loss as well as gain. And Katherine had, in gr