Countess Kate

THE Sunday at Oldburgh was not spent as Kate would have had it. It dawned upon her in the midst of horrid dreams, ending by wakening to an overpowering sick headache, the conseq...

A FORTNIGHT had passed, and had seemed nearly as long as a year, since Kate’s return from Oldburgh, when one afternoon, when she was lazily turning over the leaves of a story-bo...

“THURSDAY morning! Bother—calisthenic day!—I’ll go to sleep again, to put it off as long as I can. If I was only a little countess in her own feudal keep, I would get up in the...

IT may be doubted whether Countess Kate ever did in her childhood discover what her Aunt Barbara meant by the natural consequences of her folly, but she suffered from them never...

IT had been intended that Mrs. Lacy should rejoin her pupil at Bournemouth at the end of six weeks; but in her stead came a letter saying that she was unwell, and begging for a...

THE days passed very slowly with Kate, until the moment when she was to go to London and take her state upon her, as she thought. Till that should come to pass, she could not fe...

LADY CAERGWENT was thoroughly ashamed and bumbled by that unhappy evening. She looked so melancholy and subdued in the morning, with her heavy eyelids and inflamed eyes, and mov...

IN a very few days, Kate had been settled into the ways of the household in Bruton Street; and found one day so like another, that she sometimes asked herself whether she had no...

WHEN Kate had left the train, she was still two miles from St. James’s; and it was half-past three o’clock, so that she began to feel that she had run away without her dinner, a...

THE one hour of play with Ernest de la Poer had the effect of making Kate long more and more for a return of “fun,” and of intercourse with beings of her own age and of high spi...

“I don’t wish; I am only thinking how nice it would be, if some one would give us a famous quantity of money. Then Papa should have a pretty parsonage, like the one at Shagton;...

NOTHING of note passed during the rest of the evening. Mrs. Umfraville came home; but Kate had fallen back into the shy fit that rendered her unwilling to begin on what was pers...

THE young countess was not easily broken down. If she was ever so miserable for one hour, she was ready to be amused the next; and though when left to herself she felt very deso...

WHEN Kate opened her eyes again, and turned her face up from the pillow, she saw the drops on the window shining in the sun, and Lady de la Poer, with her bonnet off, reading un...

AFTER that first visit, Kate did see something of the De la Poers, but not more than enough to keep her in a constant ferment with the uncertain possibility, and the longing for...