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They were at supper now. Treading through the unlit hall, Catherine could hear their voices in the privée. Besides the voices of her parents she could distinguish that of her cousin Kit Oxenbrigge, for the last two years steward of the Alard household, and a fourth voice which had a foreign note in it. She remembered with a grimace that Robert Douce would be there, planning furnaces and bellows and hammer-ponds for Conster. The grimace was only half smiled off her lips as she entered the room.

"Kate!" cried her mother. "Where have you been? You look like a gipsy."

"Kate!" cried her father in a different voice. "Roiling, roaming, romping Kate! Come, kiss me—'at's a good pug."

Catherine kissed him, and held out her cheek for Robert Douce to kiss—a countrified fashion that made her mother sigh reprovingly.

Elisabeth Alard found it easier to remember that she had been bred up in the French style than that her grandfather had kept hogs in Suffolk. She was a beautiful, graceful woman, dressed harmoniously in dark colours, with pearls braided in her hair. She had been no more than eighteen when her twins were born, and might now be taken for Catherine's sister; for whereas the daughter's skin was already weatherbeaten with exposure to sun and wind, the mother's was white and soft as milk and cucumbers could make it.