"I am afraid it is necessary, then, Catherine," said Mrs. Penniman, with a good deal of solemnity. "I am afraid you don't feel the importance" She paused a little; Catherine was looking at her. "The importance of not disappointing that gallant young heart!" And Mrs. Penniman went back to her chair, by the lamp, and, with a little jerk, picked up the evening paper again.
Catherine stood there before the fire, with her hands behind her, looking at her aunt, to whom it seemed that the girl had never had just this dark fixedness in her gaze. "I don't think you understand—or that you know me," she said.
"If I don't, it is not wonderful; you trust me so little."
Catherine made no attempt to deny this charge, and for sometime more nothing was said. But Mrs. Penniman's imagination was restless, and the evening paper failed on this occasion to enchain it.
"If you succumb to the dread of your father's wrath," she said, "I don't know what will become of us."
"Did he tell you to say these things to me?"
"He told me to use my influence."
