after the shop in a week.'

Kate protested against such imprudence, and then suggested she should go
and see after his breakfast. Ralph proffered no objection, and bidding him
goodbye for the present, she went downstairs. Annie was helping Mrs. Ede to
make the toast in the front kitchen; Lizzie stood at the table buttering
it, but as soon as Kate entered they returned to their sewing, for it was
against Kate's theories that the apprentices should assist in the household
work.

'Dear mother,' she began, but desisted, and when all was ready Mrs. Ede,
remembering she had to make peace with her son, seized the tray and went
upstairs. And the moment she was gone Kate seated herself wearily on the
red, calico-covered sofa. Like an elongated armchair, it looked quaint,
neat, and dumpy, pushed up against the wall between the black fireplace on
the right and the little window shaded with the muslin blinds, under which
a pot of greenstuff bloomed freshly. She lay back thinking vaguely, her cup
of hot tea uppermost in her mind, hoping that Mrs. Ede would not keep her
waiting long; and then, as her thoughts detached themselves, she remembered
the actor whom they expected that afternoon. The annoyances which he had
unconsciously caused her had linked him to her in a curious way, and all
her prejudices vanished in the sensation of nearness that each succeeding
hour magnified, and she wondered who this being was who had brought so much
trouble into her life even before she had seen him. As the word 'trouble'
went through her mind she paused, arrested by a passing feeling of
sentimentality; but it explained nothing, defined nothing, only touched her
as a breeze does a flower, and floated away. The dreamy warmth of the fire
absorbed her more direct feelings, and for some moments she dozed in a haze
of dim sensuousness and emotive numbness. As in a dusky glass, she saw
herself a tender, loving, but unhappy woman; by her side were her querulous