strange to sit down and have breakfast all alone in another house; but the alternative to that was to wait, with the risk that everybody who intended to breakfast downstairs had already done so, so that any moment the servants might come in and begin to clear away. If that happened, Cathie felt quite sure she would not have the audacity to tell them that she had not yet breakfasted. It seemed odd to her, too, that when you had so many servants, there should not be four or five anyhow in the dining-room at breakfast time; their absence inclined her to think that breakfast was indeed over. Yet, peeping under the silver covers of the dishes on the side-table, she found that tremendous quantities of food still remained. There were kidneys, bacon, poached eggs, fish—enough to give everybody breakfast twice over. She felt that Elizabeth would be shocked at such extravagance. Personally, she secretly gloated over it; it was Lucia's house where this opulence reigned.
A middle way solved her difficulty, for a staid and elderly man looking casually in, asked her with great respect, Aunt Cathie thought, if she would have tea or coffee, and a moment after receiving her orders, brought in a little tray for her with a silver teapot and hot-water jug. She could not help asking him if she was right in beginning alone, and his assurance on that point comforted her. He also rearranged the pages of a Morning Post for her, and laid it suggestively by her, and as soon as he was gone, Cathie turned eagerly to the personal paragraphs. Yes, that was what she sought: "Lord and Lady Brayton are entertaining a large shooting-party." And then followed a string of names—Duchess of Wiltshire, Marquis of Kempsholt, Lord Arbuthnot, Mr. and Mrs. Lindsay.…
Cathie could hardly believe her eyes. But there it was—Miss Catherine Grimson.
Other people began to straggle in, and she hastily folded up the paper, feeling that she could not bear to think that other people should read that paragraph and see her name there. It was as if she had suddenly seen in the paper that Elizabeth had planted a polyanthus in the garden of Fair View Cottage. All her life she had read these paragraphs about the doings of people she had never seen, and in many cases never heard of except in such paragraphs, and here was she, recorded and printed among them! Somebody had set up her name in type, had corrected the paragraph perhaps, had sent it broadcast over England.
There was but little conversation at breakfast, and indeed she
