Kate sighed. “I am very tired,” she confessed, “but I shall be happy to eat my dinner downstairs, with the rest of you. I don’t wish—”

“An ox-cheek, with dumplings!” interrupted Mrs Nidd. “I daresay! But it ain’t what I wish, Miss Kate, and nor it isn’t what Nidd or the boys would wish neither, for to be sitting down to their dinner in company with a young lady like yourself would put them into such a stew, minding their manners and that, as would turn them clean against their vittles! So you’ll just do as Sarah tells you, dearie, and—”

“Believe that Sarah knows best!” supplied Kate, submitting.

“Which you can be bound I do!” said Mrs Nidd.

Miss Malvern was neither so young nor so guileless as her flower-like countenance frequently led strangers to suppose. She was four-and-twenty years old, and her life had not been passed in a sheltered schoolroom. The sole offspring of a clandestine marriage between the charming but sadly unsatisfactory scion of a distinguished family and a romantic girl of great beauty but somewhat inferior lineage, she was born in a garrison town, and reared in a succession of lodgings and billets. The runaway bride whom Captain Malvern had captivated disappointed her scandalized relations by suffering no regret whatsoever at being repudiated by them; and falsified their expectations by remaining so ridiculously besotted that neither the discomforts of following the drum, nor the aberrations of her volatile spouse abated her love, or daunted her spirits. She brought Kate up in the belief that Papa was the personification of every virtue (the embarrassing situations in which from time to time he found himself arising not from any obliquity but from an excess of amiability), and that it was the duty of his wife and daughter to cherish him. She died, in Portugal, when Kate was twelve years old, almost with her last breath adjuring Kate to take good care of Papa, and, to the best of her ability, Kate had done so, aided and abetted by her redoubtable nurse.