"A man who spends his life among cattle!"
"Well, it takes brains to raise cattle," she said shrewdly. "My father did it, you know."
He had no answer to that, and she left him there lighting a fresh cigarette. The match flare showed him white and absorbed.
Perhaps had Katherine been in better health she would have asserted herself more, but she was overborne by her husband's anger and too weak to combat it. She was a sick woman, more ill than even Henry knew, or perhaps he would not have kept Kay's letter from her, or forbidden her to write. She had accepted this pronunciamento as she had accepted others during all her married life, but her obedience this time was helped by her ignorance. She did not know where Kay was; before Bessie's visit she had known none of the details of Tom's injury; and even Bessie could only say that they meant to go West, that they had apparently no plans. At night, sleepless in her bed, she composed touching little epistles full of the things she had always been too shy to say, but with the morning her courage and her strength departed, and there was Henry, grimly insistent on her silence and even watching her with furtive suspicious eyes.
There had been a terrible day when Nora, red-eyed and smelling of moth preventive, came into her bedroom and handed a bunch of keys to Henry.
"That's all, is it?" he inquired. "You haven't left anything out?".
"You can come and look," said Nora with a sort of suppressed savagery. "And here's the list."
That had been Kay's clothes. The presents had been sent back long ago.
Life went on for her. People came and went. Sometimes she went downstairs and served tea, and it was quite like old times—without Kay, of course. The Sargent painting of Kay in her presentation clothes still hung on the wall; Henry had thought it would be conspicuous to remove it, but when he was in the room Katherine did not look at it. Little things like that upset him those days.
