“Whenever you please--what does it matter?” sighed poor Kate. He repeated the hour again in his anxiety, but she paid no attention. She ran up-stairs as soon as she had escaped from him, a little palefaced woe-begone ghost. Some one met her on the stairs, but she did not stop to see who it was. She did not even care to have her emotion perceived, as she would have done under other circumstances. She did not care for anything but getting to a shelter and hiding herself, and asking somebody (was it herself or some hidden counsellor she should find there?) what did it all mean?
Kate had never been very unhappy before all her life, and she did not know how to be very unhappy. She pulled all the blinds down impatiently, thinking it was wicked that the day should be so bright, and then threw herself upon her little white bed. It was not that she wanted to lie down, or to be in darkness, but only that the crisis was so strange, and she felt it necessary to conform to it. She had been thinking of John when she rose that morning, but thinking of him in such a different way, measuring him with Fred Huntley, then asking herself if it would be most for her own good to keep him or to put him aside. And lo! in a moment, here were the tables turned. He had not even the grace to deliberate or give her warning what he was going to do, but did it on the moment. She could not even upbraid him, for he had gone without saying where he was. He had plucked himself out of her fingers while she had been weighing him, balancing him. Was it not a just punishment? But he did not know that, and she had done nothing, so far as he was aware, that could give him any warrant to treat her so summarily. She lay there and shut her eyes, and rocked herself, and moaned a little. And then she opened them very wide, lay still, and gazed at the drawn blinds with her heart fluttering loudly, scarcely able to keep still with mortification and suppressed rage. Yes, he might give her up; but if he had word sent to him that she was engaged to Fred Huntley, he would feel it--oh, he would feel it! trust him for that. And Kate repeated to herself with feverish eagerness, “At five o’clock.” She longed for the hour to come that she might give him this return-blow; and then she turned and rocked herself and moaned again, feeling such a dreadful pain--a pain she could not account for in her perverse little heart.