gain for love of her. It was really too cruel. It was an
accumulation of different cruelties. Her bosom revolted; she was
agitated, perplexed, irritated, unhappy, and all in a tumult; and
although she had but one fit of crying,--to the naked eye,--yet a
person of her own sex would have seen that at one moment she was crying
from agitated nerves, at another from worry, and at the next from pity,
and then from grief.

In short, she had a good long, hearty, multiform cry; and it relieved
her swelling heart, so far that she felt able to go down now, and hide
her feelings, one and all, from friend and foe; to do which was
unfortunately a part of her nature.

She rose and plunged her face into cold water, and then smoothed her
hair.

Now, as she stood at the glass, two familiar voices came in through the
open window, and arrested her attention directly. It was her father
conversing with Griffith Gaunt. Kate pricked up her quick ears and
listened, with her back hair in her hand. She caught the substance of
their talk, only now and then she missed a word or two.

Mr. Peyton was speaking rather kindly to Griffith, and telling him he
was as sorry for his disappointment as any father could be whose
daughter had just come into a fortune. But then he went on and rather
spoiled this by asking Griffith bluntly what on earth had ever made him
think Mr. Charlton intended to leave him Bolton and Hernshaw.

Griffith replied, with manifest agitation, that Mr. Charlton had
repeatedly told him he was to be his heir. "Not," said Griffith, "that
he meant to wrong Mistress Kate, neither: poor old man, he always
thought she and I should be one."

"Ah! well," said Squire Peyton, coolly, "there is an end of all that
now."

At this observation Kate glided to the window, and laid her cheek on the
sill to listen more closely.

But Griffith made no reply.

Mr. Peyton seemed dissatisfied at his silence, and being a person who,
notwithstanding a certain superficial good-nature, saw his own side of a
question very big, and his neighbor's very little, he was harder than
perhaps he intended to be.

"Why, Master Gaunt," said he, "surely you would not follow my daughter
now,--to feed upon a woman's bread. Come, be a man; and, if you are the
girl's friend, don't stand in her light. You know she can wed your
betters, and clap Bolton Hall on to Neville's Court. No doubt it is a
disappointment to _you_: but what can't be cured must be endured; pluck