he same three
courses formed his morning meal. Porridge--the which he ate barbarously
with sugar, instead of salt,--bacon and eggs, marmalade and toast. The
appearance of the same dish at the dinner-table twice over in a
fortnight would have evoked complaint and reprisals, but he would stand
no tampering with his breakfast. The _Times_ and the _Morning Post_ lay
beside his plate. He glanced at the headlines in the interval between
porridge and bacon. Nothing going on! It was the dullest of all dead
years.

Katrine was nibbling daintily at fruit and cream. For the moment a
fruitarian craze was in full swing, and she shuddered disgustedly at the
thought of bacon, refusing to view it in its crisp and rashered form,
and obstinately harking back to the sty. In a few months' time she
would probably be discoursing learnedly of the uric acid in fruit, and
seriously contemplating a course of "Salisbury."

When the maid entered the room with the morning's letters and the young
mistress turned over her correspondence with white, ringless hands, the
discovery that she was not the wife of the man at the head of the table
would have come to an onlooker less as a surprise than as the
confirmation of a settled conviction. These two people had not the air
of a married couple. As individuals they were more calmly, amicably
detached than it is possible to be in that closest and most demanding of
relationships; moreover, family likeness betrayed itself in curve and
line, and in a natural grace of movement.

Brother and sister, alone in the dim old room, while from three
different points of view the same pictured face looked down upon their
_tete-a-tete_. From above the mantelpiece a painting; from the bureau,
a photograph printed in soft sepia tones; from the bookcase a snapshot
in a round black frame. All over the house the same face looked down
from the walls, for Katrine saw to it that no room was without a
pictured presentment of the young mistress who had reigned for one short
year over the dim old house. In the first days of loss her heart had
ached with an unbearable ache, not so much even for Martin himself, as
for that other girl who had enjoyed her kingdom for so brief a reign.
Poor, pretty, fair-haired child! there was something inconceivably
shocking in the thought of Juliet _dead_. In life she had played the
part of an irresponsible toy, born to be petted, to be served, to be
screened from every touch of care;