It was found, however, on examining her drawers, that Stella had taken everything she had which was of any value. It was also discovered later that she had taken advantage of her father’s permission to get as many new frocks as she pleased--always to make up for the loss of Charlie--by ordering for herself an ample _trousseau_, which had been sent to await her to a London hotel. She had all these things now and the lover too, which was so brilliant a practical joke that it kept the regiment in laughter for a year; but was not so regarded at home, though Mr. Tredgold himself was not able to refrain from a certain admiration when he became fully aware of it, as has been seen. It afflicted Katherine, however, with a dull, enduring pain in the midst of her longing for her sister and her sense of the dreadful vacancy made by Stella’s absence. The cheerful calculation, the peaceful looks with which Stella had hid all her wiles and preparations gave her sister a pang, not acute but profound--a constant ache which took away all the spring of her life. Even when she tried to escape from it, making to herself all those _banal_ excuses which are employed in such circumstances--about love, to which everything is permitted, and the lover’s entreaties, to which nothing can be refused, and the fact that she had to live her own life, not another’s, and was obeying the voice of Nature in choosing for herself--all these things, which Katherine presented to herself as consolations, were over and over again refused. If Stella had run away in her little white frock and garden hat, her sister could have forgiven her; but the _trousseau_, the maid, the diamonds, even the old pearls which had been given to both of them, and still remained the chief of Katherine’s possessions--that Stella should have settled and arranged all that was more than Katherine could bear. She locked away her own pearls, with what she felt afterwards to be a very absurd sentiment, and vowed that she would never wear them again. There seemed a sort of insult in the addition of that girlish decoration to all her other ornaments. But this, the reader will perceive, was very high-flown on Katherine’s part.
A day or two after this tremendous crisis, which, I need not say, was by far the most delightful public event which had occurred in Sliplin for centuries, and which moved the very island to its centre, Lady Jane called with solemnity at the Cliff. Lady Jane was better dressed on this occasion than I believe she had ever been seen to be in the memory of men. She was attired in black brocade with a train, and wore such a mantle as everybody said must have been got for the occasion, since it was like nothing that had ever been seen on Lady Jane’s shoulders before. The furs, too, were unknown to Sliplin; perhaps she wore them in more favoured places, perhaps she had borrowed them for the occasion. The reason of all this display was beyond the divination of Katherine, who received her visitor half with the suppressed resentment which she felt she owed to everyone who could be supposed privy to Stella’s plans, and half with the wistful longing for an old friend, a wiser and more experienced person, to console herself. Katherine had abandoned the young ladies’ room, with all its double arrangements and suggestions of a life that was over. She sat in the large drawing-room, among the costly, crowded furniture, feeling as if, though less expensive, she was but one of them--a daughter needed, like the Italian cabinets, for the due furnishing of the house.