Kate was sitting with clasped hands, her hazel eyes narrowed and golden with light. She was almost little-girlish in her excitement and pleasure, and of course the corners of her mouth were uptilted at their most winged angle. Aunt Katherine, watching her, thought, “She is better than pretty, this grand-niece of mine. She is fascinating. Just to look at her stirs your imagination.”
But she said, “Eat your toast before it is cold, I advise you. And don’t neglect the marmalade. It is unusually good marmalade they serve here at the Green Shutter.”
And so Kate came to earth. “But such a nice earth!” she said to herself.
Before they had finished their tea, Aunt Katherine rose to a pitch of confidences that surprised herself. But it was just exactly as though in Kate she had found a friend, a friend to whom she was able to open her heart. At this moment in her life Miss Frazier needed this sort of a confidante badly. They were talking about Elsie again and her coldness and indifference to Kate.
“There is one obvious explanation for it,” Aunt Katherine said. “I can think of no other. She may be jealous. She may have been jealous from the first minute of your arrival.”
Kate was too surprised to think at all. “Jealous—_of me_? Why?”
“That you might take her place with me, cheat her somehow of what she apparently considers hers. She sees, as you have guessed, that I do not like her. May she not be all the more jealous of you just because of that?”
“Oh, no, no, no.” Kate was thinking clearly again. “She isn’t horrid like that. I know it. She’s too beautiful and lovely. There’s something about her that makes any such idea just impossible. She mayn’t like me, and I may be cross with her, but for all that—for all that I know she’s not a _mean_ person, Aunt Katherine.”
Kate was amazed herself at having so suddenly become Elsie’s champion. Loyalty to that strange girl had apparently been born in her all in a second. Or was it loyalty only to the comrade she had glimpsed flashingly, once in the mirror last night, and once in sunshine this morning? Whatever it was to, it was very real and staunch.
Aunt Katherine’s face lightened remarkably. “You may be right, and I earnestly hope you are,” she said. “For if Elsie were unfriendly toward you for any such reason—well, it would be the last straw, the very last.”