"I should just as lief she'd do it as not--I want her to have a good time," cried Kate, "if--if you only wouldn't try to make her think as you do about some things."
It was out now, and the clutch at her throat relaxed.
"Oh," said Miss Saxon. There was a volume of meaning in the monosyllable as she spoke it, and then her face grew cold and sharp as an icicle. "What things?"
It was really a pity that Kate was not better informed as to her aunt's peculiar views. But she caught at the one which had offended her most, and thrust it forward roughly. "About hating everything, especially the men," she cried, "and not wanting girls to be married. They say you want to leave your money to somebody who'll promise to stay single all her life."
Miss Saxon started, and a faint pink color rose in her cheeks, old and wrinkled as they were. "Did your sister tell you that?" she demanded.
"No," said Kate, "I don't know as she ever heard of it till I told her. I told her last night, and how I felt about it, too."
"And she said--?" queried Miss Saxon. The pink was still in her cheeks.
"Well," said Kate--she hesitated a moment and then looked straight at the questioner--"she as good as said it was none of my business, and she'd do what she thought was right whatever came of it."
"Ah!" said Aunt Katharine, with an accent of relief. "And I presume you didn't tell her that you were coming here this morning. I see now why you came so early." She looked at her niece with a faint sarcastic smile, then said coldly, "I am very fond of your sister."
The words sounded somehow like a threat. The blood mounted in Kate's face, and she clinched her hands on the sides of her chair. "I know it," she said, "and so is every one else fond of her. Grandfather likes her just as much as you do. Perhaps it's new for you to care for a girl as you care for her, but it's no new thing for Esther. It's been the way ever since she was little."
The bearing of the fact on Kate's ground of quarrel with her aunt was perhaps not clear, but some fine wrinkles gathered in Miss Saxon's forehead.
"And does Esther like everybody?" she asked, with a returning sharpness.
"She keeps it to herself if she doesn't," said Kate. "She's kind to everybody--most everybody," she added, with a sudden remembrance of the one person to whom Esther had not of late seemed always kind. "And that's how she gets into trouble, making everybody like her, with her soft pleasant ways and saying nice things. Oh, I've had to stand up for her so many times to keep her from being imposed on! I'm standing up for her now," she went on passionately. "It's your _ideas_ you care about, and you want her to take up with them, whether they'll make her happy or not. But I care for _her_, and I want to make you stop."