process, illuminating not only us but a considerable stretch of the surrounding world. Next moment she contrasted her own lot with theirs and gave back the ring.
“I won’t take that unless William gives it me himself,” she said. “Keep it for me, Katharine.”
“I assure you everything’s perfectly all right,” said Ralph. “Let me tell William”
He was about, in spite of Cassandra’s protest, to reach the door, when Mrs. Hilbery, either warned by the parlour-maid or conscious with her usual prescience of the need for her intervention, opened the door and smilingly surveyed them.
“My dear Cassandra!’ she exclaimed. “How delightful to see you back again! What a coincidence!” she observed, in a general way. “William is upstairs. The kettle boils over. Where’s Katharine, I say? I go to look, and I find Cassandra!” She seemed to have proved something to her own satisfaction, although nobody felt certain precisely what thing it was.
“I find Cassandra,” she repeated.
“She missed her train,” Katharine interposed, seeing that Cassandra was unable to speak.
“Life,” began Mrs. Hilbery, drawing inspiration from the portraits on the wall apparently, “consists in missing trains and in finding———” But she pulled herself up and remarked that the kettle must have boiled completely over everything.
To Katharine’s agitated mind it appeared that this kettle was an enormous kettle, capable of deluging the house in its incessant showers of steam, the enraged representative of all those household duties which she had neglected. She ran hastily up to the drawing-room, and the rest followed her, for Mrs. Hilbery put her arm round Cassandra and drew her upstairs. They found Rodney observing the kettle with uneasiness but with such absence of mind that Katharine’s catastrophe was in
