, there was
always a long visit to Ormiston Castle, looking out from the cliff edge
upon the restless North Sea. Lovers came in due course. For over and
above its own shapeliness--which surely was reason enough--Katherine's
hand was well worth winning from the worldly point of view. She would
have money; and Mrs. St. Quentin's influence would count for much in
the case of a great-nephew-by-marriage who aspired to a parliamentary
or diplomatic career. But the lovers also went, for Katherine asked a
great deal--not so much of them, perhaps, as of herself. She had taken
an idea, somehow, that marriage, to be in the least satisfactory, must
be based on love; and that love worth the name is an essentially
two-sided business. Indirectly the girl had learnt much on this
difficult subject from her great-aunt; and with characteristic
directness had agreed with herself to wait till her heart was touched,
if she waited a lifetime--though of exactly in what either her heart,
or the touching of it, consisted she was deliciously innocent as yet.

And then, in the summer of 1841, Sir Richard Calmady came to Ormiston.
He and her brother Roger had been at Eton together. Katherine
remembered him, years ago, as a well-bred and courteously contemptuous
schoolboy, upon whose superior mind, small female creatures--busy about
dolls, and victims of the athletic restrictions imposed by
petticoats--made but slight impression. Latterly Sir Richard's name had
come to be one to conjure with in racing circles, thanks to the
performances of certain horses bred and trained at the Brockhurst
stables; though some critics, it is true, deplored his tendency to
neglect the older and more legitimate sport of flat-racing in favour of
steeple-chasing. It was said he aspired to rival the long list of
victories achieved by Mr. Elmore's Gaylad and Lottery, and the
successes of Peter Simple the famous gray. This much Katherine had
heard of him from her brother. And having her haughty turns--as what
charming woman has not?--set him down as probably a rough sort of
person, notwithstanding his wealth and good connections, a kind of
gentleman jockey, upon whom it would be easy to take a measure of
pretty revenge for his boyish indifference to her existence. But the
meeting, and the young man, alike, turned out quite other than she had
anticipated. For she found a person as well furnished in all polite and
social arts as herself, with no flavour of the stable about hi