"Am _I_ my brother's
keeper?" Doubtless she could have found plenty of excellent people to
tell her she was not. Her only difficulty was with Ted. Nothing could be
done till he had got over his nervous dread of meeting Vincent.

Katherine had no precise idea of what had passed between her brother and
Audrey, and how far Vincent had been connected with it; but she had
gathered from Ted's silence all that she wanted to know. Whatever Audrey
had said or done, there was an end of her as far as he was concerned. It
was from the boy's silence, too, that she realised the extent of his
suffering. Before the inevitable thing had happened, he had done nothing
but talk of Audrey, sometimes with melancholy, more often in the jocular
strain adopted by self-conscious persons to carry off some ridiculous
fatality. Anger following suspense had driven him to think of suicide;
but now that it was all over with him, he had no idea of killing
himself. Katherine had never been much afraid of that, and as yet none
of the other things she had dreaded had happened; but it was evident
that the boy's nature had been deeply affected, and that the shock was a
moral one. It was not Audrey's unfaithfulness that had hurt him so much
as her untruthfulness. Ted thought so little of himself in some ways
that he could have understood the one, and therefore forgiven it. The
other was the unpardonable sin; it injured what he loved better than
himself--his idea of Audrey. Katherine did not know this, but she saw
that the present time was the moral turning-point in his life, and that
his pain was the sort that shapes character for good or for evil. But,
after all, she knew very little of the elements that went to make up
Ted's character. His imagination, as she had pointed out to Audrey on a
memorable occasion, had been developed long before his heart, and out of
all proportion to it. It had so happened that all at once the passionate
part of his nature had been roused and shaken before it was half-formed.
She asked herself what line would be taken now by those forces of
feeling set free so violently and so abruptly checked?

Well, at any rate Audrey's conduct had not had the effect of driving
brother and sister apart. It had drawn them closer together if
anything. Ted seemed to find relief in Katherine's society from the
torment of his own thoughts, and he had shown no desire to look for
distraction abroad; indeed the difficulty was to make him go out of