Kitty began to feel so uneasy on the subject of her dinner and her guests, that she actually ventured on putting a question to her grandmother.
"Will they be long, do you think, before they come ?" she asked.
The old lady's worldly wisdom had passed, by this time from a state of suspicion to a state of certainty.

"My child," she answered, "they won't come at all." Kitty ran to her mother, eager to inquire if what Mrs.Presty had told her could possibly be true.

Before a word had passed her lips, she shrank back, too frightened to speak.
Never, in her little experience, had she been startled by such a look in her mother's face as the look that confronted her now.

For the first time Catherine saw her child trembling at the sight of her.

Before that discovery, the emotions that shook her under the insult which she had received lost their hold.