Helped her, that is, to bear up by day, but oh the nights! Oh, those long, miserable nights of heart-break and homesickness, when the pain was so intense as almost to drive her to appeal on her knees to Aunt Pike to let her stay at home, to promise abjectly to be and do all that she could wish.

And there were those other terrible moments, too, when misery nearly drove her to tell the truth about Anna and Lettice.
Those were, perhaps, the hardest impulses of all to fight, for she knew that but to speak would mean, probably, that she would be considered fit to remain in her home, and Anna it would be who would be sent away.
All her life after Kitty was thankful that she had had the strength given her to resist this temptation, but it was a very real one at the time.

There was to be no delay in sending her away.

She was to go at the end of the Christmas holidays, and active preparations for her outfit began at once.

To Betty this was most enthralling, and largely made up for the painful part, but Kitty took no interest in it whatever.
Not even the fact of having a new Inverness and umbrella, and four new dresses all at once, not to speak of gloves, and hats, and shoes, and a number of other things, could rouse her to any sense of pleasure.
She was very sorry later, and wept many a bitter tear over the new blotter her father bought her, and the nice muff and boa he gave her.
When it was too late, she could never see them without remembering the delight with which he unwrapped them and gave them to her, the expectant look in his kind eyes of the pleasure they would bring to her, and of her own coldness, her unsmilingness, the indifference with which she took them and laid them down with scarcely a glance, yet all the while her heart was breaking, breaking with her love for him and all he did for her.