When she reached Vale Royal, which she did late that night, after a dreary¹ and dangerous drive of fourteen miles, at a walking pace, over frozen roads, she told her parents of the detention² of the train by the snow-drift, but she did not tell them of her meeting with Lady Kenilworth’s brother.

 

She was tired and chilled, and went at once to a hot bath and her bed, whither her mother brought her a cup of boiling milk with two spoonsful of Cognac in it.

 

“It ought by rights to be milked on to the brandy,” said that good lady. “But that can’t be done here, though there are half a score of beautiful Alderneys standing³ on the Home farm only just to supply the house—and such a dairy, my dear! Chiny the walls is, and marble the floors. Only I don’t hold with their method of churning, and the wenches are much too fine. I showed ’em how to turn out butter one day, and I heard ’em say as I come away that my proper place was the kitchen! Well, good-night, my dearie; sleep well.”

 

“Good-night, dear mother,” said Katherine with unusual tenderness, for she was not demonstrative, and her parents to her were almost strangers.

 

“It is not her fault,” she thought, “if we are upstarts and interlopers in this place which Henry the Second gave the Roxhalls.”

 

Then her great fatigue⁵ conquered her and, the brandied milk aiding, she fell sound asleep and slept dreamlessly until the chimes of the clock tower sounded eleven in the still, sunny, frosty, noonday air.

 

Then she awoke with the sense of something odiously⁶ painful having happened, and, as she saw the withered⁷ bouquet⁸ of violets, which she had told her maid to leave, with her gloves and her muff on a table near, she remembered, and the words of Hurstmanceaux came back on her mind with

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