'They said he had left town. I asked no more questions; I was ashamed,' said Catherine, simply enough.

'You needn't have taken so compromising a step if you had had a little more confidence in me,' Mrs Penniman observed with a good deal of grandeur.

'Is it to New Orleans?' Catherine went on, irrelevantly. It was the first time Mrs Penniman had heard of New Orleans in this connection; but she was averse to letting Catherine know that she was in the dark. She attempted to strike an illumination from the instructions she had received from Morris.' My dear Catherine,' she said, 'when a separation has been agreed upon, the farther he goes away the better.'

'Agreed upon? Has he agreed upon it with you?' A consummate sense of her aunt's meddlesome folly had come over her during the last five minutes, and she was sickened at the thought that Mrs Penniman had been let loose, as it were, upon her happiness.

'He certainly has sometimes advised with me,' said Mrs Penniman.

'Is it you, then, that has changed him and made him so un - natural?' Catherine cried.' Is it you that have worked on him and taken him from me? He doesn't belong to you, and I don't see how you have anything to do with what is between us! Is it you that have made this plot, and told him to leave me? How could you be so wicked, so cruel? What have I ever done to you? Why can't you leave me alone? I was afraid you would spoil everything; for you do spoil everything you touch! I was afraid of you all the time we were abroad; I had no rest when I thought that you were always talking to him.' Catherine went on with growing vehemence, pouring out, in her bitterness and in the clairvoyance of her passion (which suddenly, jumping all processes, made her judge her aunt finally and without appeal), the uneasiness which had lain for so many months upon her heart.

Mrs Penniman was scared and bewildered; she saw no prospect of introducing her little account of the purity of Morris's motives.' You are a most ungrateful girl!' she cried.' Do you scold me for talking with him? I'm sure we never talked of any - thing but you!'

'Yes; and that was the way you worried him; you made him tired of my very name! I wish you had never spoken of me to him; I never asked your help!'

'I am sure if it hadn't been for me he would never have come to the house, and you would never have known that he thought of you,' Mrs Penniman rejoined, with a good deal of justice.

'I wish he never had come to the house, and that I never had known it! That's better than this,' said poor Catherine.

'You are a very ungrateful girl,' Aunt Lavinia repeated. Catherine's outbreak of anger and the sense of wrong gave her, while they lasted, the satisfaction that comes from all assertion of force; they hurried her along, and there is always a sort of pleasure in cleaving the air. But at bottom she hated to be violent, and she was conscious of no aptitude for organized resentment. She calmed herself with a great effort, but with great rapidity, and walked about the room a few moments, trying to say to herself that her aunt had meant everything for the best. She did not succeed in saying it with much conviction, but after a little she was able to speak quietly enough.

'I am not ungrateful, but I am very unhappy. It's hard to be grateful for that,' she said. 'Will you please tell me where he is?'

'I haven't the least idea; I am not in secret correspondence with him!' And Mrs Penniman wished, indeed, that she were, so that she might let him know how Catherine abused her, after all she had done.

'Was it a plan of his, then, to break off - ?' By this time Catherine had become completely quiet.