Sleep considerably repaired her little ladyship; and when she had awakened, and supped up a bason of beef-tea, toast and all, with considerable appetite, she was so much herself again, that there was no reason that anyone should be kept at home to attend to her. Mary’s absence was extremely inconvenient, as she was organist and leader of the choir.
“So, Katie dear,” she said, when she saw her patient on her legs again, making friends with the last new kitten of the old cat, “you will not mind being left alone, will you? It is only for the Litany and catechising, you know.”
Kate looked blank, and longed to ask that Sylvia might stay with her, but did not venture; knowing that she was not ill enough for it to be a necessity, and that no one in that house was ever kept from church, except for some real and sufficient cause.
But the silly thoughts that passed through the little head in the hour of solitude would fill two or three volumes. In the first place, she was affronted. They made very little of her, considering who she was, and how she had come to see them at all risks, and how ill she had been! They would hardly have treated a little village child so negligently as their visitor, the Countess—
Then her heart smote her. She remembered Mary’s tender and assiduous nursing all the morning, and how she had already stayed from service and Sunday school; and she recollected her honour for her friends for not valuing her for her rank; and in that mood she looked out the Psalms and Lessons, which she had not been able to read in the morning, and when she had finished them, began to examine the book-case in search of a new, or else a very dear old, Sunday book.
But then something went “crack,”—or else it was Kate’s fancy—for she started as if it had been a cannon-ball; and though she sat with her book in her lap by the fire in Mary’s room, all the dear old furniture and pictures round her, her head was weaving an unheard-of imagination, about robbers coming in rifling everything—coming up the stairs—creak, creak, was that their step?—she held her breath, and her eyes dilated—seizing her for the sake of her watch! What article there would be in the paper—“Melancholy disappearance of the youthful Countess of Caergwent.” Then Aunt Barbara would be sorry she had treated her so cruelly; then Mary would know she ought not to have abandoned the child who had thrown herself on her protection.