The Shuttle: By Frances Hodgson Burnett

Salter stood on deck and watched the crowd dispersing. Some of the people were laughing and some had red eyes. Groups collected on the wharf and tried to say still more last words to their friends crowding against the rail.

The Worthingtons kept their places and were still looking out, by this time disappointedly. It seemed that the friend or friends they expected were not coming. Salter saw that Miss Vanderpoel looked more disappointed than the rest. She leaned forward and strained her eyes to see. Just at the last moment there was the sound of trampling horses and rolling wheels again. From the arriving carriage descended hastily an elderly woman, who lifted out a little boy excited almost to tears. He was a dear, chubby little person in flapping sailor trousers, and he carried a splendidly-caparisoned toy donkey in his arms. Salter could not help feeling slightly excited himself as they rushed forward. He wondered if they were passengers who would be left behind.

They were not passengers, but the arrivals Miss Vanderpoel had been expecting so ardently. They had come to say good-bye to her and were too late for that, at least, as the gangway was just about to be withdrawn.

Miss Vanderpoel leaned forward with an amazingly fervid expression on her face.

“Tommy! Tommy!” she cried to the little boy. “Here I am, Tommy. We can say good-bye from here.”

The little boy, looking up, broke into a wail of despair.

“Betty! Betty! Betty!” he cried. “I wanted to kiss you, Betty.”

Betty held out her arms. She did it with entire forgetfulness of the existence of any lookers-on, and with such outreaching love on her face that it seemed as if the child must feel her touch. She made a beautiful, warm, consoling bud of her mouth.

“We’ll kiss each other from here, Tommy,” she said. “See, we can. Kiss me, and I will kiss you.”

Tommy held out his arms and the magnificent donkey. “Betty,” he cried, “I brought you my donkey. I wanted to give it to you for a present, because you liked it.”

Miss Vanderpoel bent further forward and addressed the elderly woman.

“Matilda,” she said, “please pack Master Tommy’s present and send it to me! I want it very much.”

Tender smiles irradiated the small face. The gangway was withdrawn, and, amid the familiar sounds of a big craft’s first struggle, the ship began to move. Miss Vanderpoel still bent forward and held out her arms.

“I will soon come back, Tommy,” she cried, “and we are always friends.”

The child held out his short blue serge arms also, and Salter watching him could not but be touched for all his gloom of mind.

“I wanted to kiss you, Betty,” he heard in farewell. “I did so want to kiss you.”

And so they steamed away upon the blue.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SECOND-CLASS PASSENGER

Up to a certain point the voyage was like all other voyages. During the first two days there were passengers who did not appear on deck, but as the weather was fair for the season of the year, there were fewer absentees than is usual. Indeed, on the third day the deck chairs were all filled, people who were given to tramping during their voyages had begun to walk their customary quota of carefully-measured miles the day. There were a few pale faces dozing here and there, but the general aspect of things had begun to be sprightly. Shuffleboard players and quoit enthusiasts began to bestir themselves, the deck steward appeared regularly with light repasts of beef tea and biscuits, and the brilliant hues of red, blue, or yellow novels made frequent spots of colour upon the promenade. Persons of some initiative went to the length of making tentative observations to their next-chair neighbours. The second-cabin passengers were cheerful, and the steerage passengers, having tumbled up, formed friendly groups and began to joke with each other.

The Worthingtons had plainly the good fortune to be respectable sailors. They reappeared on the second day and established regular habits, after the manner of accustomed travellers. Miss Vanderpoel’s habits were regular from the first, and when Salter saw her he was impressed even more at the outset with her air of being at home instead of on board ship. Her practically well-chosen corner was an agreeable place to look at. Her chair was built for ease of angle and width, her cushions were of dark rich colours, her travelling rugs were of black fox fur, and she owned an adjustable table for books and accompaniments. She appeared early in the morning and walked until the sea air crimsoned her cheeks, she sat and read with evident enjoyment, she talked to her companions and plainly entertained them.

Salter, being bored and in bad spirits, found himself watching her rather often, but he knew that but for the small, comic episode of Tommy, he would have definitely disliked her. The dislike would not have been fair, but it would have existed in spite of himself. It would not have been fair because it would have been founded simply upon the ignoble resentment of envy, upon the poor truth that he was not in the state of mind to avoid resenting the injustice of fate in bestowing multimillions upon one person and his offspring. He resented his own resentment, but was obliged to acknowledge its existence in his humour. He himself, especially and peculiarly, had always known the bitterness of poverty, the humiliation of seeing where money could be well used, indeed, ought to be used, and at the same time having ground into him the fact that there was no money to lay one’s hand on. He had hated it even as a boy, because in his case, and that of his people, the whole thing was undignified and unbecoming. It was humiliating to him now to bring home to himself the fact that the thing for which he was inclined to dislike this tall, up-standing girl was her unconscious (he realised the unconsciousness of it) air of having always lived in the atmosphere of millions, of never having known a reason why she should not have anything she had a desire for. Perhaps, upon the whole, he said to himself, it was his own ill luck and sense of defeat which made her corner, with its cushions and comforts, her properly attentive maid, and her cold weather sables expressive of a fortune too colossal to be decent.

The episode of the plump, despairing Tommy he had liked, however. There had been a fine naturalness about it and a fine practicalness in her prompt order to the elderly nurse that the richly-caparisoned donkey should be sent to her. This had at once made it clear to the donor that his gift was too valuable to be left behind.

“She did not care twopence for the lot of us,” was his summing up. “She might have been nothing but the nicest possible warm-hearted nursemaid or a cottage woman who loved the child.”

He was quite aware that though he had found himself more than once observing her, she herself had probably not recognised the trivial fact of his existing upon that other side of the barrier which separated the higher grade of passenger from the lower. There was, indeed, no reason why she should have singled him out for observation, and she was, in fact, too frequently absorbed in her own reflections to be in the frame of mind to remark her fellow passengers to the extent which was generally customary with her. During her crossings of the Atlantic she usually made mental observation of the people on board. This time, when she was not talking to the Worthingtons, or reading, she was thinking of the possibilities of her visit to Stornham. She used to walk about the deck thinking of them and, sitting in her chair, sum them up as her eyes rested on the rolling and breaking waves.

There were many things to be considered, and one of the first was the perfectly sane suggestion her father had made.

“Suppose she does not want to be rescued? Suppose you find her a comfortable fine lady who adores her husband.”

Such a thing was possible, though Bettina did not think it probable. She intended, however, to prepare herself even for this. If she found Lady Anstruthers plump and roseate, pleased with herself and her position, she was quite equal to making her visit appear a casual and conventional affair.

“I ought to wish it to be so,” she thought, “and, yet, how disappointingly I should feel she had changed. Still, even ethical reasons would not excuse one for wishing her to be miserable.” She was a creature with a number of passionate ideals which warred frequently with the practical side of her mentality. Often she used to walk up and down the deck or lean upon the ship’s side, her eyes stormy with emotions.

“I do not want to find Rosy a heartless woman, and I do not want to find her wretched. What do I want? Only the usual thing—that what cannot be undone had never been done. People are always wishing that.”

She was standing near the second-cabin barrier thinking this, the first time she saw the passenger with the red hair. She had paused by mere chance, and while her eyes were stormy with her thought, she suddenly became conscious that she was looking directly into other eyes as darkling as her own. They were those of a man on the wrong side of the barrier. He had a troubled, brooding face, and, as their gaze met, each of them started slightly and turned away with the sense of having unconsciously intruded and having been intruded upon.

“That rough-looking man,” she commented to herself, “is as anxious and disturbed as I am.”

Salter did look rough, it was true. His well-worn clothes had suffered somewhat from the restrictions of a second-class cabin shared with two other men. But the aspect which had presented itself to her brief glance had been not so much roughness of clothing as of mood expressing itself in his countenance. He was thinking harshly and angrily of the life ahead of him.

These looks of theirs which had so inadvertently encountered each other were of that order which sometimes startles one when in passing a stranger one finds one’s eyes entangled for a second in his or hers, as the case may be. At such times it seems for that instant difficult to disentangle one’s gaze. But neither of these two thought of the other much, after hurrying away. Each was too fully mastered by personal mood.

There would, indeed, have been no reason for their encountering each other further but for “the accident,” as it was called when spoken of afterwards, the accident which might so easily have been a catastrophe. It occurred that night. This was two nights before they were to land.

Everybody had begun to come under the influence of that cheerfulness of humour, the sense of relief bordering on gaiety, which generally elates people when a voyage is drawing to a close. If one has been dull, one begins to gather one’s self together, rejoiced that the boredom is over. In any case, there are plans to be made, thought of, or discussed.

“You wish to go to Stornham at once?” Mrs. Worthington said to Bettina. “How pleased Lady Anstruthers and Sir Nigel must be at the idea of seeing you with them after so long.”

“I can scarcely tell you how I am looking forward to it,” Betty answered.

She sat in her corner among her cushions looking at the dark water which seemed to sweep past the ship, and listening to the throb of the engines. She was not gay. She was wondering how far the plans she had made would prove feasible. Mrs. Worthington was not aware that her visit to Stornham Court was to be unannounced. It had not been necessary to explain the matter. The whole affair was simple and decorous enough. Miss Vanderpoel was to bid good-bye to her friends and go at once to her sister, Lady Anstruthers, whose husband’s country seat was but a short journey from London. Bettina and her father had arranged that the fact should be kept from the society paragraphist. This had required some adroit management, but had actually been accomplished.

As the waves swished past her, Bettina was saying to herself, “What will Rosy say when she sees me! What shall I say when I see Rosy? We are drawing nearer to each other with every wave that passes.”

A fog which swept up suddenly sent them all below rather early. The Worthingtons laughed and talked a little in their staterooms, but presently became quiet and had evidently gone to bed. Bettina was restless and moved about her room alone after she had sent away her maid. She at last sat down and finished a letter she had been writing to her father.

“As I near the land,” she wrote, “I feel a sort of excitement. Several times to-day I have recalled so distinctly the picture of Rosy as I saw her last, when we all stood crowded upon the wharf at New York to see her off. She and Nigel were leaning upon the rail of the upper deck. She looked such a delicate, airy little creature, quite like a pretty schoolgirl with tears in her eyes. She was laughing and crying at the same time, and kissing both her hands to us again and again. I was crying passionately myself, though I tried to conceal the fact, and I remember that each time I looked from Rosy to Nigel’s heavy face the poignancy of my anguish made me break forth again. I wonder if it was because I was a child, that he looked such a contemptuous brute, even when he pretended to smile. It is twelve years since then. I wonder—how I wonder, what I shall find.”

She stopped writing and sat a few moments, her chin upon her hand, thinking. Suddenly she sprang to her feet in alarm. The stillness of the night was broken by wild shouts, a running of feet outside, a tumult of mingled sounds and motion, a dash and rush of surging water, a strange thumping and straining of engines, and a moment later she was hurled from one side of her stateroom to the other by a crashing shock which seemed to heave the ship out of the sea, shuddering as if the end of all things had come.

It was so sudden and horrible a thing that, though she had only been flung upon a pile of rugs and cushions and was unhurt, she felt as if she had been struck on the head and plunged into wild delirium. Above the sound of the dashing and rocking waves, the straining and roaring of hacking engines and the pandemonium of voices rose from one end of the ship to the other, one wild, despairing, long-drawn shriek of women and children. Bettina turned sick at the mad terror in it— the insensate, awful horror.

“Something has run into us!” she gasped, getting up with her heart leaping in her throat.

She could hear the Worthingtons’ tempest of terrified confusion through the partitions between them, and she remembered afterwards that in the space of two or three seconds, and in the midst of their clamour, a hundred incongruous thoughts leaped through her brain. Perhaps they were this moment going down. Now she knew what it was like! This thing she had read of in newspapers! Now she was going down in mid-ocean, she, Betty Vanderpoel! And, as she sprang to clutch her fur coat, there flashed before her mental vision a gruesome picture of the headlines in the newspapers and the inevitable reference to the millions she represented.

“I must keep calm,” she heard herself say, as she fastened the long coat, clenching her teeth to keep them from chattering. “Poor Daddy—poor Daddy!”

Maddening new sounds were all about her, sounds of water dashing and churning, sounds of voices bellowing out commands, straining and leaping sounds of the engines. What was it—what was it? She must at least find out. Everybody was going mad in the staterooms, the stewards were rushing about, trying to quiet people, their own voices shaking and breaking into cracked notes. If the worst had happened, everyone would be fighting for life in a few minutes. Out on deck she must get and find out for herself what the worst was.

She was the first woman outside, though the wails and shrieks swelled below, and half-dressed, ghastly creatures tumbled gasping up the companion-way.

“What is it?” she heard. “My God! what’s happened? Where’s the Captain! Are we going down! The boats! The boats!”

It was useless to speak to the seamen rushing by. They did not see, much less hear! She caught sight of a man who could not be a sailor, since he was standing still. She made her way to him, thankful that she had managed to stop her teeth chattering.

“What has happened to us?” she said.

He turned and looked at her straitly. He was the second-cabin passenger with the red hair.

“A tramp steamer has run into us in the fog,” he answered.

“How much harm is done?”

“They are trying to find out. I am standing here on the chance of hearing something. It is madness to ask any man questions.”

They spoke to each other in short, sharp sentences, knowing there was no time to lose.

“Are you horribly frightened?” he asked.

She stamped her foot.

“I hate it—I hate it!” she said, flinging out her hand towards the black, heaving water. “The plunge—the choking! No one could hate it more. But I want to DO something!”

She was turning away when he caught her hand and held her.

“Wait a second,” he said. “I hate it as much as you do, but I believe we two can keep our heads. Those who can do that may help, perhaps. Let us try to quiet the people. As soon as I find out anything I will come to your friends’ stateroom. You are near the boats there. Then I shall go back to the second cabin. You work on your side and I’ll work on mine. That’s all.”

“Thank you. Tell the Worthingtons. I’m going to the saloon deck.” She was off as she spoke.

Upon the stairway she found herself in the midst of a struggling panic-stricken mob, tripping over each other on the steps, and clutching at any garment nearest, to drag themselves up as they fell, or were on the point of falling. Everyone was crying out in question and appeal.

Bettina stood still, a firm, tall obstacle, and clutched at the hysteric woman who was hurled against her.

“I’ve been on deck,” she said. “A tramp steamer has run into us. No one has time to answer questions. The first thing to do is to put on warm clothes and secure the life belts in case you need them.”

At once everyone turned upon her as if she was an authority. She replied with almost fierce determination to the torrent of words poured forth.

“I know nothing further—only that if one is not a fool one must make sure of clothes and belts.”

“Quite right, Miss Vanderpoel,” said one young man, touching his cap in nervous propitiation.

“Stop screaming,” Betty said mercilessly to the woman. “It’s idiotic—the more noise you make the less chance you have. How can men keep their wits among a mob of shrieking, mad women?”

That the remote Miss Vanderpoel should have emerged from her luxurious corner to frankly bully the lot of them was an excellent shock for the crowd. Men, who had been in danger of losing their heads and becoming as uncontrolled as the women, suddenly realised the fact and pulled themselves together. Bettina made her way at once to the Worthingtons’ staterooms.

There she found frenzy reigning. Blanche and Marie Worthington were darting to and fro, dragging about first one thing and then another. They were silly with fright, and dashed at, and dropped alternately, life belts, shoes, jewel cases, and wraps, while they sobbed and cried out hysterically. “Oh, what shall we do with mother! What shall we do!”

The manners of Betty Vanderpoel’s sharp schoolgirl days returned to her in full force. She seized Blanche by the shoulder and shook her.

“What a donkey you are!” she said. “Put on your clothes. There they are,” pushing her to the place where they hung. “Marie—dress yourself this moment. We may be in no real danger at all.”

“Do you think not! Oh, Betty!” they wailed in concert. “Oh, what shall we do with mother!”

“Where is your mother?”

“She fainted—Louise–-“

Betty was in Mrs. Worthington’s cabin before they had finished speaking. The poor woman had fainted, and struck her cheek against a chair. She lay on the floor in her nightgown, with blood trickling from a cut on her face. Her maid, Louise, was wringing her hands, and doing nothing whatever.

“If you don’t bring the brandy this minute,” said the beautiful Miss Vanderpoel, “I’ll box your ears. Believe me, my girl.” She looked so capable of doing it that the woman was startled and actually offended into a return of her senses. Miss Vanderpoel had usually the best possible manners in dealing with her inferiors.

Betty poured brandy down Mrs. Worthington’s throat and applied strong smelling salts until she gasped back to consciousness. She had just burst into frightened sobs, when Betty heard confusion and exclamations in the adjoining room. Blanche and Marie had cried out, and a man’s voice was speaking. Betty went to them. They were in various stages of undress, and the red-haired second-cabin passenger was standing at the door.

“I promised Miss Vanderpoel–-” he was saying, when Betty came forward. He turned to her promptly.

“I come to tell you that it seems absolutely to be relied on that there is no immediate danger. The tramp is more injured than we are.”

“Oh, are you sure? Are you sure?” panted Blanche, catching at his sleeve.

“Yes,” he answered. “Can I do anything for you?” he said to Bettina, who was on the point of speaking.

“Will you be good enough to help me to assist Mrs. Worthington into her berth, and then try to find the doctor.”

He went into the next room without speaking. To Mrs. Worthington he spoke briefly a few words of reassurance. He was a powerful man, and laid her on her berth without dragging her about uncomfortably, or making her feel that her weight was greater than even in her most desponding moments she had suspected. Even her helplessly hysteric mood was illuminated by a ray of grateful appreciation.

“Oh, thank you—thank you,” she murmured. “And you are quite sure there is no actual danger, Mr.–-?”

“Salter,” he terminated for her. “You may feel safe. The damage is really only slight, after all.”

“It is so good of you to come and tell us,” said the poor lady, still tremulous. “The shock was awful. Our introduction has been an alarming one. I—I don’t think we have met during the voyage.”

“No,” replied Salter. “I am in the second cabin.”

“Oh! thank you. It’s so good of you,” she faltered amiably, for want of inspiration. As he went out of the stateroom, Salter spoke to Bettina.

“I will send the doctor, if I can find him,” he said. “I think, perhaps, you had better take some brandy yourself. I shall.”

“It’s queer how little one seems to realise even that there are second-cabin passengers,” commented Mrs. Worthington feebly. “That was a nice man, and perfectly respectable. He even had a kind of—of manner.”

CHAPTER IX

LADY JANE GREY

It seemed upon the whole even absurd that after a shock so awful and a panic wild enough to cause people to expose their very souls—for there were, of course, endless anecdotes to be related afterwards, illustrative of grotesque terror, cowardice, and utter abandonment of all shadows of convention— that all should end in an anticlimax of trifling danger, upon which, in a day or two, jokes might be made. Even the tramp steamer had not been seriously injured, though its injuries were likely to be less easy of repair than those of the Meridiana.

“Still,” as a passenger remarked, when she steamed into the dock at Liverpool, “we might all be at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean this morning. Just think what columns there would have been in the newspapers. Imagine Miss Vanderpoel’s being drowned.”

“I was very rude to Louise, when I found her wringing her hands over you, and I was rude to Blanche,” Bettina said to Mrs. Worthington. “In fact I believe I was rude to a number of people that night. I am rather ashamed.”

“You called me a donkey,” said Blanche, “but it was the best thing you could have done. You frightened me into putting on my shoes, instead of trying to comb my hair with them. It was startling to see you march into the stateroom, the only person who had not been turned into a gibbering idiot. I know I was gibbering, and I know Marie was.”

“We both gibbered at the red-haired man when he came in,” said Marie. “We clutched at him and gibbered together. Where is the red-haired man, Betty? Perhaps we made him ill. I’ve not seen him since that moment.”

“He is in the second cabin, I suppose,” Bettina answered, “but I have not seen him, either.”

“We ought to get up a testimonial and give it to him, because he did not gibber,” said Blanche. “He was as rude and as sensible as you were, Betty.”

They did not see him again, in fact, at that time. He had reasons of his own for preferring to remain unseen. The truth was that the nearer his approach to his native shores, the nastier, he was perfectly conscious, his temper became, and he did not wish to expose himself by any incident which might cause him stupidly and obviously to lose it.

The maid, Louise, however, recognised him among her companions in the third-class carriage in which she travelled to town. To her mind, whose opinions were regulated by neatly arranged standards, he looked morose and shabbily dressed. Some of the other second-cabin passengers had made themselves quite smart in various, not too distinguished ways. He had not changed his dress at all, and the large valise upon the luggage rack was worn and battered as if with long and rough usage. The woman wondered a little if he would address her, and inquire after the health of her mistress. But, being an astute creature, she only wondered this for an instant, the next she realised that, for one reason or another, it was clear that he was not of the tribe of second-rate persons who pursue an accidental acquaintance with their superiors in fortune, through sociable interchange with their footmen or maids.

When the train slackened its speed at the platform of the station, he got up, reaching down his valise and leaving the carriage, strode to the nearest hansom cab, waving the porter aside.

“Charing Cross,” he called out to the driver, jumped in, and was rattled away.

… . .

During the years which had passed since Rosalie Vanderpoel first came to London as Lady Anstruthers, numbers of huge luxurious hotels had grown up, principally, as it seemed, that Americans should swarm into them and live at an expense which reminded them of their native land. Such establishments would never have been built for English people, whose habit it is merely to “stop” at hotels, not to LIVE in them. The tendency of the American is to live in his hotel, even though his intention may be only to remain in it two days. He is accustomed to doing himself extremely well in proportion to his resources, whether they be great or small, and the comforts, as also the luxuries, he allows himself and his domestic appendages are in a proportion much higher in its relation to these resources than it would be were he English, French, German, or Italians. As a consequence, he expects, when he goes forth, whether holiday-making or on business, that his hostelry shall surround him, either with holiday luxuries and gaiety, or with such lavishness of comfort as shall alleviate the wear and tear of business cares and fatigues. The rich man demands something almost as good as he has left at home, the man of moderate means something much better. Certain persons given to regarding public wants and desires as foundations for the fortune of business schemes having discovered this, the enormous and sumptuous hotel evolved itself from their astute knowledge of common facts. At the entrances of these hotels, omnibuses and cabs, laden with trunks and packages frequently bearing labels marked with red letters “S. S. So-and-So, Stateroom—Hold—Baggage-room,” drew up and deposited their contents and burdens at regular intervals. Then men with keen, and often humorous faces or almost painfully anxious ones, their exceedingly well-dressed wives, and more or less attractive and vivacious-looking daughters, their eager little girls, and un-English-looking little boys, passed through the corridors in flocks and took possession of suites of rooms, sometimes for twenty-four hours, sometimes for six weeks.

The Worthingtons took possession of such a suite in such a hotel. Bettina Vanderpoel’s apartments faced the Embankment. From her windows she could look out at the broad splendid, muddy Thames, slowly rolling in its grave, stately way beneath its bridges, bearing with it heavy lumbering barges, excited tooting little penny steamers and craft of various shapes and sizes, the errand or burden of each meaning a different story.

It had been to Bettina one of her pleasures of the finest epicurean flavour to reflect that she had never had any brief and superficial knowledge of England, as she had never been to the country at all in those earlier years, when her knowledge of places must necessarily have been always the incomplete one of either a schoolgirl traveller or a schoolgirl resident, whose views were limited by the walls of restriction built around her.

If relations of the usual ease and friendliness had existed between Lady Anstruthers and her family, Bettina would, doubtless, have known her sister’s adopted country well. It would have been a thing so natural as to be almost inevitable, that she would have crossed the Channel to spend her holidays at Stornham. As matters had stood, however, the child herself, in the days when she had been a child, had had most definite private views on the subject of visits to England. She had made up her young mind absolutely that she would not, if it were decently possible to avoid it, set her foot upon English soil until she was old enough and strong enough to carry out what had been at first her passionately romantic plans for discovering and facing the truth of the reason for the apparent change in Rosy. When she went to England,she would go to Rosy. As she had grown older, having in the course of education and travel seen most Continental countries, she had liked to think that she had saved, put aside for less hasty consumption and more delicate appreciation of flavours, as it were, the country she was conscious she cared for most.

“It is England we love, we Americans,” she had said to her father. “What could be more natural? We belong to it—it belongs to us. I could never be convinced that the old tie of blood does not count. All nationalities have come to us since we became a nation, but most of us in the beginning came from England. We are touching about it, too. We trifle with France and labour with Germany, we sentimentalise over Italy and ecstacise over Spain—but England we love. How it moves us when we go to it, how we gush if we are simple and effusive, how we are stirred imaginatively if we are of the perceptive class. I have heard the commonest little half-educated woman say the prettiest, clumsy, emotional things about what she has seen there. A New England schoolma’am, who has made a Cook’s tour, will almost have tears in her voice as she wanders on with her commonplaces about hawthorn hedges and thatched cottages and white or red farms. Why are we not unconsciously pathetic about German cottages and Italian villas? Because we have not, in centuries past, had the habit of being born in them. It is only an English cottage and an English lane, whether white with hawthorn blossoms or bare with winter, that wakes in us that little yearning, grovelling tenderness that is so sweet. It is only nature calling us home.”

Mrs. Worthington came in during the course of the morning to find her standing before her window looking out at the Thames, the Embankment, the hansom cabs themselves, with an absolutely serious absorption. This changed to a smile as she turned to greet her.

“I am delighted,” she said. “I could scarcely tell you how much. The impression is all new and I am excited a little by everything. I am so intensely glad that I have saved it so long and that I have known it only as part of literature. I am even charmed that it rains, and that the cabmen’s mackintoshes are shining and wet.” She drew forward a chair, and Mrs. Worthington sat down, looking at her with involuntary admiration.

“You look as if you were delighted,” she said. “Your eyes—you have amazing eyes, Betty! I am trying to picture to myself what Lady Anstruthers will feel when she sees you. What were you like when she married?”

Bettina sat down, smiling and looking, indeed, quite incredibly lovely. She was capable of a warmth and a sweetness which were as embracing as other qualities she possessed were powerful.

“I was eight years old,” she said. “I was a rude little girl, with long legs and a high, determined voice. I know I was rude. I remember answering back.”

“I seem to have heard that you did not like your brother-in-law, and that you were opposed to the marriage.”

“Imagine the undisciplined audacity of a child of eight `opposing’ the marriage of her grown-up sister. I was quite capable of it. You see in those days we had not been trained at all (one had only been allowed tremendous liberty), and interfered conversationally with one’s elders and betters at any moment. I was an American little girl, and American little girls were really—they really were!” with a laugh, whose musical sound was after all wholly non-committal.

“You did not treat Sir Nigel Anstruthers as one of your betters.”

“He was one of my elders, at all events, and becomingness of bearing should have taught me to hold my little tongue. I am giving some thought now to the kind of thing I must invent as a suitable apology when I find him a really delightful person, full of virtues and accomplishments. Perhaps he has a horror of me.”

“I should like to be present at your first meeting,” Mrs. Worthington reflected. “You are going down to Stornham to-morrow?”

“That is my plan. When I write to you on my arrival, I will tell you if I encountered the horror.” Then, with a swift change of subject and a lifting of her slender, velvet line of eyebrow, “I am only deploring that I have not time to visit the Tower.”

Mrs. Worthington was betrayed into a momentary glance of uncertainty, almost verging in its significance on a gasp.

“The Tower? Of London? Dear Betty!”

Bettina’s laugh was mellow with revelation.

“Ah!” she said. “You don’t know my point of view; it’s plain enough. You see, when I delight in these things, I think I delight most in my delight in them. It means that I am almost having the kind of feeling the fresh American souls had who landed here thirty years ago and revelled in the resemblance to Dickens’s characters they met with in the streets, and were historically thrilled by the places where people’s heads were chopped off. Imagine their reflections on Charles I., when they stood in Whitehall gazing on the very spot where that poor last word was uttered—`Remember.’ And think of their joy when each crossing sweeper they gave disproportionate largess to, seemed Joe All Alones in the slightest disguise.”

“You don’t mean to say–-” Mrs. Worthington was vaguely awakening to the situation.

“That the charm of my visit, to myself, is that I realise that I am rather like that. I have positively preserved something because I have kept away. You have been here so often and know things so well, and you were even so sophisticated when you began, that you have never really had the flavours and emotions. I am sophisticated, too, sophisticated enough to have cherished my flavours as a gourmet tries to save the bouquet of old wine. You think that the Tower is the pleasure of housemaids on a Bank Holiday. But it quite makes me quiver to think of it,” laughing again. “That I laugh, is the sign that I am not as beautifully, freshly capable of enjoyment as those genuine first Americans were, and in a way I am sorry for it.”

Mrs. Worthington laughed also, and with an enjoyment.

“You are very clever, Betty,” she said.

“No, no,” answered Bettina, “or, if I am, almost everybody is clever in these days. We are nearly all of us comparatively intelligent.”

“You are very interesting at all events, and the Anstruthers will exult in you. If they are dull in the country, you will save them.”

“I am very interested, at all events,” said Bettina, “and interest like mine is quite passe. A clever American who lives in England, and is the pet of duchesses, once said to me (he always speaks of Americans as if they were a distant and recently discovered species), `When they first came over they were a novelty. Their enthusiasm amused people, but now, you see, it has become vieux jeu. Young women, whose specialty was to be excited by the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey, are not novelties any longer. In fact, it’s been done, and it’s done FOR as a specialty.’ And I am excited about the Tower of London. I may be able to restrain my feelings at the sight of the Beef Eaters, but they will upset me a little, and I must brace myself, I must indeed.”

“Truly, Betty?” said Mrs. Worthington, regarding her with curiosity, arising from a faint doubt of her entire seriousness,mingled with a fainter doubt of her entire levity.

Betty flung out her hands in a slight, but very involuntary-looking, gesture, and shook her head.

“Ah!” she said, “it was all TRUE, you know. They were all horribly real—the things that were shuddered over and sentimentalised about. Sophistication, combined with imagination, makes them materialise again, to me, at least, now I am here. The gulf between a historical figure and a man or woman who could bleed and cry out in human words was broad when one was at school. Lady Jane Grey, for instance, how nebulous she was and how little one cared. She seemed invented merely to add a detail to one’s lesson in English history. But, as we drove across Waterloo Bridge, I caught a glimpse of the Tower, and what do you suppose I began to think of? It was monstrous. I saw a door in the Tower and the stone steps, and the square space, and in the chill clear, early morning a little slender, helpless girl led out, a little, fair, real thing like Rosy, all alone—everyone she belonged to far away, not a man near who dared utter a word of pity when she turned her awful, meek, young, desperate eyes upon him. She was a pious child, and, no doubt, she lifted her eyes to the sky. I wonder if it was blue and its blueness broke her heart, because it looked as if it might have pitied such a young, patient girl thing led out in the fair morning to walk to the hacked block and give her trembling pardon to the black-visored man with the axe, and then `commending her soul to God’ to stretch her sweet slim neck out upon it.”

“Oh, Betty, dear!” Mrs. Worthington expostulated.

Bettina sprang to her and took her hand in pretty appeal.

“I beg pardon! I beg pardon, I really do,” she exclaimed. “I did not intend deliberately to be painful. But that— beneath the sophistication—is something of what I bring to England.”

CHAPTER X

“IS LADY ANSTRUTHERS AT HOME?”

All that she had brought with her to England, combined with what she had called “sophistication,” but which was rather her exquisite appreciation of values and effects, she took with her when she went the next day to Charing Cross Station and arranged herself at her ease in the railway carriage, while her maid bought their tickets for Stornham.

What the people in the station saw, the guards and porters, the men in the book stalls, the travellers hurrying past, was a striking-looking girl, whose colouring and carriage made one turn to glance after her, and who, having bought some periodicals and papers, took her place in a first-class compartment and watched the passersby interestedly through the open window. Having been looked at and remarked on during her whole life, Bettina did not find it disturbing that more than one corduroy-clothed porter and fresh-coloured, elderly gentleman, or freshly attired young one, having caught a glimpse of her through her window, made it convenient to saunter past or hover round. She looked at them much more frankly than they looked at her. To her they were all specimens of the types she was at present interested in. For practical reasons she was summing up English character with more deliberate intention than she had felt in the years when she had gradually learned to know Continental types and differentiate such peculiarities as were significant of their ranks and nations. As the first Reuben Vanderpoel had studied the countenances and indicative methods of the inhabitants of the new parts of the country in which it was his intention to do business, so the modernity of his descendant applied itself to observation for reasons parallel in nature though not in actual kind. As he had brought beads and firewater to bear as agents upon savages who would barter for them skins and products which might be turned into money, so she brought her nineteenth-century beauty, steadfastness of purpose and alertness of brain to bear upon the matter the practical dealing with which was the end she held in view. To bear herself in this matter with as practical a control of situations as that with which her great-grandfather would have borne himself in making a trade with a previously unknown tribe of Indians was quite her intention, though it had not occurred to her to put it to herself in any such form. Still, whether she was aware of the fact or not, her point of view was exactly what the first Reuben Vanderpoel’s had been on many very different occasions. She had before her the task of dealing with facts and factors of which at present she knew but little. Astuteness of perception, self-command, and adaptability were her chief resources. She was ready, either for calm, bold approach, or equally calm and wholly non-committal retreat.

The perceptions she had brought with her filled her journey into Kent with delicious things, delicious recognition of beauties she had before known the existence of only through the reading of books, and the dwelling upon their charms as reproduced, more or less perfectly, on canvas. She saw roll by her, with the passing of the train, the loveliness of land and picturesqueness of living which she had saved for herself with epicurean intention for years. Her fancy, when detached from her thoughts of her sister, had been epicurean, and she had been quite aware that it was so. When she had left the suburbs and those villages already touched with suburbanity behind, she felt herself settle into a glow of luxurious enjoyment in the freshness of her pleasure in the familiar, and yet unfamiliar, objects in the thick-hedged fields, whose broad-branched, thick-foliaged oaks and beeches were more embowering in their shade, and sweeter in their green than anything she remembered that other countries had offered her, even at their best. Within the fields the hawthorn hedges beautifully enclosed were groups of resigned mother sheep with their young lambs about them. The curious pointed tops of the red hopkilns, piercing the trees near the farmhouses, wore an almost intentional air of adding picturesque detail. There were clusters of old buildings and dots of cottages and cottage gardens which made her now and then utter exclamations of delight. Little inarticulate Rosy had seen and felt it all twelve years before on her hopeless bridal home-coming when Nigel had sat huddled unbecomingly in the corner of the railway carriage. Her power of expression had been limited to little joyful gasps and obvious laudatory adjectives, smothered in their birth by her first glance at her bridegroom. Betty, in seeing it, knew all the exquisiteness of her own pleasure, and all the meanings of it.

Yes, it was England—England. It was the England of Constable and Morland, of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot. The land which softly rolled and clothed itself in the rich verdure of many trees, sometimes in lovely clusters, sometimes in covering copse, was Constable’s; the ripe young woman with the fat-legged children and the farmyard beasts about her, as she fed the hens from the wooden piggin under her arm, was Morland’s own. The village street might be Miss Mitford’s, the well-to-do house Jane Austen’s own fancy, in its warm brick and comfortable decorum. She laughed a little as she thought it.

“That is American,” she said, “the habit of comparing every stick and stone and breathing thing to some literary parallel. We almost invariably say that things remind us of pictures or books—most usually books. It seems a little crude, but perhaps it means that we are an intensely literary and artistic people.”

She continued to find comparisons revealing to her their appositeness, until her journey had ended by the train’s slackening speed and coming to a standstill before the rural-looking little station which had presented its quaint aspect to Lady Anstruthers on her home-coming of years before.

It had not, during the years which certainly had given time for change, altered in the least. The station master had grown stouter and more rosy, and came forward with his respectful, hospitable air, to attend to the unusual-looking young lady, who was the only first-class passenger. He thought she must be a visitor expected at some country house, but none of the carriages, whose coachmen were his familiar acquaintances, were in waiting. That such a fine young lady should be paying a visit at any house whose owners did not send an equipage to attend her coming, struck him as unusual. The brougham from the “Crown,” though a decent country town vehicle, seemed inadequate. Yet, there it stood drawn up outside the station, and she went to it with the manner of a young lady who had ordered its attendance and knew it would be there.

Wells felt a good deal of interest. Among the many young ladies who descended from the first-class compartments and passed through the little waiting-room on their way to the carriages of the gentry they were going to visit, he did not know when a young lady had “caught his eye,” so to speak, as this one did. She was not exactly the kind of young lady one would immediately class mentally as “a foreigner,” but the blue of her eyes was so deep. and her hair and eyelashes so dark, that these things, combining themselves with a certain “way” she had, made him feel her to be of a type unfamiliar to the region, at least.

He was struck, also, by the fact that the young lady had no maid with her. The truth was that Bettina had purposely left her maid in town. If awkward things occurred, the presence of an attendant would be a sort of complication. It was better, on the first approach, to be wholly unencumbered.

“How far are we from Stornham Court?” she inquired.

“Five miles, my lady,” he answered, touching his cap. She expressed something which to the rural and ingenuous, whose standards were defined, demanded a recognition of probable rank.

“I’d like to know,” was his comment to his wife when he went home to dinner, “who has gone to Stornham Court to-day. There’s few enough visitors go there, and none such as her, for certain. She don’t live anywhere on the line above here, either, for I’ve never seen her face before. She was a tall, handsome one—she was, but it isn’t just that made you look after her. She was a clever one with a spirit, I’ll be bound. I was wondering what her ladyship would have to say to her.”

“Perhaps she was one of HIS fine ladies?” suggestively.

“That she wasn’t, either. And, as for that, I wonder what he’d have to say to such as she is.”

There was complexity of element enough in the thing she was on her way to do, Bettina was thinking, as she was driven over the white ribbon of country road that unrolled over rise and hollow, between the sheep-dotted greenness of fields and the scented hedges. The soft beauty enclosing her was a little shut out from her by her mental attitude. She brought forward for her own decisions upon suitable action a number of possible situations she might find herself called upon to confront. The one thing necessary was that she should be prepared for anything whatever, even for Rosy’s not being pleased to see her, or for finding Sir Nigel a thoroughly reformed and amiable character

“It is the thing which seemingly CANNOT happen which one is most likely to find one’s self face to face with. It will be a little awkward to arrange, if he has developed every domestic virtue, and is delighted to see me.”

Under such rather confusing conditions her plan would be to present to them, as an affectionate surprise, the unheralded visit, which might appear a trifle uncalled for. She felt happily sure of herself under any circumstances not partaking of the nature of collisions at sea. Yet she had not behaved absolutely ill at the time of the threatened catastrophe in the Meridiana. Her remembrance, an oddly sudden one, of the definite manner of the red-haired second-class passenger, assured her of that. He had certainly had all his senses about him, and he had spoken to her as a person to be counted on.

Her pulse beat a little more hurriedly as the brougham entered Stornham village. It was picturesque, but struck her as looking neglected. Many of the cottages had an air of dilapidation. There were many broken windows and unmended garden palings. A suggested lack of whitewash in several cases was not cheerful.

“I know nothing of the duties of English landlords,” she said, looking through her carriage window, “but I should do it myself, if I were Rosy.”

She saw, as she was taken through the park gateway, that that structure was out of order, and that damaged diamond panes peered out from under the thickness of the ivy massing itself over the lodge.

“Ah!” was her thought, “it does not promise as it should. Happy people do not let things fall to pieces.”

Even winding avenue, and spreading sward, and gorse, and broom, and bracken, enfolding all the earth beneath huge trees, were not fair enough to remove a sudden remote fear which arose in her rapidly reasoning mind. It suggested to her a point of view so new that, while she was amazed at herself for not having contemplated it before, she found herself wishing that the coachman would drive rather more slowly, actually that she might have more time to reflect.

They were nearing a dip in the park, where there was a lonely looking pool. The bracken was thick and high there, and the sun, which had just broken through a cloud, had pierced the trees with a golden gleam.

A little withdrawn from this shaft of brightness stood two figures, a dowdy little woman and a hunchbacked boy. The woman held some ferns in her hand, and the boy was sitting down and resting his chin on his hands, which were folded on the top of a stick.

“Stop here for a moment,” Bettina said to the coachman. “I want to ask that woman a question.”

She had thought that she might discover if her sister was at the Court. She realised that to know would be a point of advantage. She leaned forward and spoke.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, “I wonder if you can tell me–-“

The woman came forward a little. She had a listless step and a faded, listless face.

“What did you ask?” she said.

Betty leaned still further forward.

“Can you tell me–-” she began and stopped. A sense of stricture in the throat stopped her, as her eyes took in the washed-out colour of the thin face, the washed-out colour of the thin hair—thin drab hair, dragged in straight, hard unbecomingness from the forehead and cheeks.

Was it true that her heart was thumping, as she had heard it said that agitation made hearts thump?

She began again.

“Can you—tell me if—Lady Anstruthers is at home?” she inquired. As she said it she felt the blood surge up from the furious heart, and the hand she had laid on the handle of the door of the brougham clutched it involuntarily.

The dowdy little woman answered her indifferently, staring at her a little.

“I am Lady Anstruthers,” she said.

Bettina opened the carriage door and stood upon the ground.

“Go on to the house,” she gave order to the coachman, and, with a somewhat startled look, he drove away.

“Rosy!” Bettina’s voice was a hushed, almost awed, thing. “YOU are Rosy?”

The faded little wreck of a creature began to look frightened.

“Rosy!” she repeated, with a small, wry, painful smile.

She was the next moment held in the folding of strong, young arms, against a quickly beating heart. She was being wildly kissed, and the very air seemed rich with warmth and life.

“I am Betty,” she heard. “Look at me, Rosy! I am Betty. Look at me and remember!”

Lady Anstruthers gasped, and broke into a faint, hysteric laugh. She suddenly clutched at Bettina’s arm. For a minute her gaze was wild as she looked up.

“Betty,” she cried out. “No! No! No! I can’t believe it! I can’t! I can’t!”

That just this thing could have taken place in her, Bettina had never thought. As she had reflected on her way from the station, the impossible is what one finds one’s self face to face with. Twelve years should not have changed a pretty blonde thing of nineteen to a worn, unintelligent-looking dowdy of the order of dowdiness which seems to have lived beyond age and sex. She looked even stupid, or at least stupefied. At this moment she was a silly, middle-aged woman, who did not know what to do. For a few seconds Bettina wondered if she was glad to see her, or only felt awkward and unequal to the situation.

“I can’t believe you,” she cried out again, and began to shiver. “Betty! Little Betty? No! No! it isn’t!”

She turned to the boy, who had lifted his chin from his stick, and was staring.

“Ughtred! Ughtred!” she called to him. “Come! She says—she says–-“

She sat down upon a clump of heather and began to cry. She hid her face in her spare hands and broke into sobbing.

“Oh, Betty! No!” she gasped. “It’s so long ago—it’s so far away. You never came—no one—no one—came!”

The hunchbacked boy drew near. He had limped up on his stick. He spoke like an elderly, affectionate gnome, not like a child.

“Don’t do that, mother,” he said. “Don’t let it upset you so, whatever it is.”

“It’s so long ago; it’s so far away!” she wept, with catches in her breath and voice. “You never came!”

Betty knelt down and enfolded her again. Her bell-like voice was firm and clear.

“I have come now,” she said. “And it is not far away. A cable will reach father in two hours.”

Pursuing a certain vivid thought in her mind, she looked at her watch.

“If you spoke to mother by cable this moment,” she added, with accustomed coolness, and she felt her sister actually start as she spoke, “she could answer you by five o’clock.”

Lady Anstruther’s start ended in a laugh and gasp more hysteric than her first. There was even a kind of wan awakening in her face, as she lifted it to look at the wonderful newcomer. She caught her hand and held it, trembling, as she weakly laughed.

“It must be Betty,” she cried. “That little stern way! It is so like her. Betty—Betty—dear!” She fell into a sobbing, shaken heap upon the heather. The harrowing thought passed through Betty’s mind that she looked almost like a limp bundle of shabby clothes. She was so helpless in her pathetic, apologetic hysteria.

“I shall—be better,” she gasped. “It’s nothing. Ughtred, tell her.”

“She’s very weak, really,” said the boy Ughtred, in his mature way. “She can’t help it sometimes. I’ll get some water from the pool.”

“Let me go,” said Betty, and she darted down to the water. She was back in a moment. The boy was rubbing and patting his mother’s hands tenderly.

“At any rate,” he remarked, as one consoled by a reflection, “father is not at home.”

CHAPTER XI

“I THOUGHT YOU HAD ALL FORGOTTEN “

As, after a singular half hour spent among the bracken under the trees, they began their return to the house, Bettina felt that her sense of adventure had altered its character. She was still in the midst of a remarkable sort of exploit, which might end anywhere or in anything, but it had become at once more prosaic in detail and more intense in its significance. What its significance might prove likely to be when she faced it, she had not known, it is true. But this was different from— from anything. As they walked up the sun-dappled avenue she kept glancing aside at Rosy, and endeavouring to draw useful conclusions. The poor girl’s air of being a plain, insignificant frump, long past youth, struck an extraordinary and, for the time, unexplainable note. Her ill-cut, out-of- date dress, the cheap suit of the hunchbacked boy, who limped patiently along, helped by his crutch, suggested possible explanations which were without doubt connected with the thought which had risen in Bettina’s mind, as she had been driven through the broken-hinged entrance gate. What extraordinary disposal was being made of Rosy’s money? But her each glance at her sister also suggested complication upon complication.

The singular half hour under the trees by the pool, spent, after the first hysteric moments were over, in vague exclaimings and questions, which seemed half frightened and all at sea, had gradually shown her that she was talking to a creature wholly other than the Rosalie who had so well known and loved them all, and whom they had so well loved and known. They did not know this one, and she did not know them, she was even a little afraid of the stir and movement of their life and being. The Rosy they had known seemed to be imprisoned within the wall the years of her separated life had built about her. At each breath she drew Bettina saw how long the years had been to her, and how far her home had seemed to lie away, so far that it could not touch her, and was only a sort of dream, the recalling of which made her suddenly begin to cry again every few minutes. To Bettina’s sensitively alert mind it was plain that it would not do in the least to drag her suddenly out of her prison, or cloister, whichsoever it might be. To do so would be like forcing a creature accustomed only to darkness, to stare at the blazing sun. To have burst upon her with the old impetuous, candid fondness would have been to frighten and shock her as if with something bordering on indecency. She could not have stood it; perhaps such fondness was so remote from her in these days that she had even ceased to be able to understand it.

“Where are your little girls?” Bettina asked, remembering that there had been notice given of the advent of two girl babies.

“They died,” Lady Anstruthers answered unemotionally. “They both died before they were a year old. There is only Ughtred.”

Betty glanced at the boy and saw a small flame of red creep up on his cheek. Instinctively she knew what it meant, and she put out her hand and lightly touched his shoulder.

“I hope you’ll like me, Ughtred,” she said.

He almost started at the sound of her voice, but when he turned his face towards her he only grew redder, and looked awkward without answering. His manner was that of a boy who was unused to the amenities of polite society, and who was only made shy by them.

Without warning, a moment or so later, Bettina stopped in the middle of the avenue, and looked up at the arching giant branches of the trees which had reached out from one side to the other, as if to clasp hands or encompass an interlacing embrace. As far as the eye reached, they did this, and the beholder stood as in a high stately pergola, with breaks of deep azure sky between. Several mellow, cawing rooks were floating solemnly beneath or above the branches, now wand then settling in some highest one or disappearing in the thick greenness.

Lady Anstruthers stopped when her sister did so, and glanced at her in vague inquiry. It was plain that she had outlived even her sense of the beauty surrounding her.

“What are you looking at, Betty?” she asked.

“At all of it,” Betty answered. “It is so wonderful.”

“She likes it,” said Ughtred, and then rather slunk a step behind his mother, as if he were ashamed of himself.

“The house is just beyond those trees,” said Lady Anstruthers.

They came in full view of it three minutes later. When she saw it, Betty uttered an exclamation and stopped again to enjoy effects.

“She likes that, too,” said Ughtred, and, although he said it sheepishly, there was imperfectly concealed beneath the awkwardness a pleasure in the fact.

“Do you?” asked Rosalie, with her small, painful smile.

Betty laughed.

“It is too picturesque, in its special way, to be quite credible,” she said.

“I thought that when I first saw it,” said Rosy.

“Don’t you think so, now?”

“Well,” was the rather uncertain reply, “as Nigel says, there’s not much good in a place that is falling to pieces.”

“Why let it fall to pieces?” Betty put it to her with impartial promptness.

“We haven’t money enough to hold it together,” resignedly.

As they climbed the low, broad, lichen-blotched steps, whose broken stone balustrades were almost hidden in clutching, untrimmed ivy, Betty felt them to be almost incredible, too. The uneven stones of the terrace the steps mounted to were lichen-blotched and broken also. Tufts of green growths had forced themselves between the flags, and added an untidy beauty. The ivy tossed in branches over the red roof and walls of the house. It had been left unclipped, until it was rather an endlessly clambering tree than a creeper. The hall they entered had the beauty of spacious form and good, old oaken panelling. There were deep window seats and an ancient high-backed settle or so, and a massive table by the fireless hearth. But there were no pictures in places where pictures had evidently once hung, and the only coverings on the stone floor were the faded remnants of a central rug and a worn tiger skin, the head almost bald and a glass eye knocked out.

Bettina took in the unpromising details without a quiver of the extravagant lashes. These, indeed, and the eyes pertaining to them, seemed rather to sweep the fine roof, and a certain minstrel’s gallery and staircase, than which nothing could have been much finer, with the look of an appreciative admirer of architectural features and old oak. She had not journeyed to Stornham Court with the intention of disturbing Rosy, or of being herself obviously disturbed. She had come to observe situations and rearrange them with that intelligence of which unconsidered emotion or exclamation form no part.

“It is the first old English house I have seen,” she said, with a sigh of pleasure. “I am so glad, Rosy—I am so glad that it is yours.”

She put a hand on each of Rosy’s thin shoulders—she felt sharply defined bones as she did so—and bent to kiss her. It was the natural affectionate expression of her feeling, but tears started to Rosy’s eyes, and the boy Ughtred, who had sat down in a window seat, turned red again, and shifted in his place.

“Oh, Betty!” was Rosy’s faint nervous exclamation, “you seem so beautiful and—so—so strange—that you frighten me.”

Betty laughed with the softest possible cheerfulness, shaking her a little.

“I shall not seem strange long,” she said, “after I have stayed with you a few weeks, if you will let me stay with you.”

“Let you! Let you!” in a sort of gasp.

Poor little Lady Anstruthers sank on to a settle and began to cry again. It was plain that she always cried when things occurred. Ughtred’s speech from his window seat testified at once to that.

“Don’t cry, mother,” he said. “You know how we’ve talked that over together. It’s her nerves,” he explained to Bettina. “We know it only makes things worse, but she can’t stop it.”

Bettina sat on the settle, too. She herself was not then aware of the wonderful feeling the poor little spare figure experienced, as her softly strong young arms curved about it. She was only aware that she herself felt that this was a heart-breaking thing, and that she must not—MUST not let it be seen how much she recognised its woefulness. This was pretty, fair Rosy, who had never done a harm in her happy life—this forlorn thing was her Rosy.

“Never mind,” she said, half laughing again. “I rather want to cry myself, and I am stronger than she is. I am immensely strong.”

“Yes! Yes!” said Lady Anstruthers, wiping her eyes, and making a tremendous effort at self-respecting composure. “You are strong. I have grown so weak in—well, in every way. Betty, I’m afraid this is a poor welcome. You see—I’m afraid you’ll find it all so different from—from New York.”

“I wanted to find it different,” said Betty.

“But—but—I mean—you know–-” Lady Anstruthers turned helplessly to the boy. Bettina was struck with the painful truth that she looked even silly as she turned to him. “Ughtred—tell her,” she ended, and hung her head.

Ughtred had got down at once from his seat and limped forward. His unprepossessing face looked as if he pulled his childishness together with an unchildish effort.

“She means,” he said, in his awkward way, “that she doesn’t know how to make you comfortable. The rooms are all so shabby—everything is so shabby. Perhaps you won’t stay when you see.”

Bettina perceptibly increased the firmness of her hold on her sister’s body. It was as if she drew it nearer to her side in a kind of taking possession. She knew that the moment had come when she might go this far, at least, without expressing alarming things.

“You cannot show me anything that will frighten me,” was the answer she made. “I have come to stay, Rosy. We can make things right if they require it. Why not?”

Lady Anstruthers started a little, and stared at her. She knew ten thousand reasons why things had not been made right, and the casual inference that such reasons could be lightly swept away as if by the mere wave of a hand, implied a power appertaining to a time seeming so lost forever that it was too much for her.

“Oh, Betty, Betty!” she cried, “you talk as if—you are so–-!”

The fact, so simple to the members of the abnormal class to which she of a truth belonged, the class which heaped up its millions, the absolute knowledge that there was a great deal of money in the world and that she was of those who were among its chief owners, had ceased to seem a fact, and had vanished into the region of fairy stories.

That she could not believe it a reality revealed itself to Bettina, as by a flash, which was also a revelation of many things. There would be unpleasing truths to be learned, and she had not made her pilgrimage for nothing. But—in any event—there were advantages without doubt in the circumstance which subjected one to being perpetually pointed out as a daughter of a multimillionaire. As this argued itself out for her with rapid lucidity, she bent and kissed Rosy once more. She even tried to do it lightly, and not to allow the rush of love and pity in her soul to betray her.

“I talk as if—as if I were Betty,” she said. “You have forgotten. I have not. I have been looking forward to this for years. I have been planning to come to you since I was eleven years old. And here we sit.”

“You didn’t forget? You didn’t?” faltered the poor wreck of Rosy. “Oh! Oh! I thought you had all forgotten me—quite—quite!”

And her face went down in her spare, small hands, and she began to cry again.

CHAPTER XII

UGHTRED

Bettina stood alone in her bedroom a couple of hours later. Lady Anstruthers had taken her to it, preparing her for its limitations by explaining that she would find it quite different from her room in New York. She had been pathetically nervous and flushed about it, and Bettina had also been aware that the apartment itself had been hastily, and with much moving of objects from one chamber to another, made ready for her.

The room was large and square and low. It was panelled in small squares of white wood. The panels were old enough to be cracked here and there, and the paint was stained and yellow with time, where it was not knocked or worn off. There was a small paned, leaded window which filled a large part of one side of the room, and its deep seat was an agreeable feature. Sitting in it, one looked out over several red-walled gardens, and through breaks in the trees of the park to a fair beyond. Bettina stood before this window for a few moments, and then took a seat in the embrasure, that she might gaze out and reflect at leisure.

Her genius, as has before been mentioned, was the genius for living, for being vital. Many people merely exist, are kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the persistent action of normal functions will allow of their doing no less. Bettina Vanderpoel had lived vividly, and in the midst of a self-created atmosphere of action from her first hour. It was not possible for her to be one of the horde of mere spectators. Wheresoever she moved there was some occult stirring of the mental, and even physical, air. Her pulses beat too strongly, her blood ran too fast to allow of inaction of mind or body. When, in passing through the village, she had seen the broken windows and the hanging palings of the cottages, it had been inevitable that, at once, she should, in thought, repair them, set them straight. Disorder filled her with a sort of impatience which was akin to physical distress. If she had been born a poor woman she would have worked hard for her living, and found an interest, almost an exhilaration, in her labour. Such gifts as she had would have been applied to the tasks she undertook. It had frequently given her pleasure to imagine herself earning her livelihood as a seamstress, a housemaid, a nurse. She knew what she could have put into her service, and how she could have found it absorbing. Imagination and initiative could make any service absorbing. The actual truth was that if she had been a housemaid, the room she set in order would have taken a character under her touch; if she had been a seamstress, her work would have been swiftly done, her imagination would have invented for her combinations of form and colour; if she had been a nursemaid, the children under her care would never have been sufficiently bored to become tiresome or intractable, and they also would have gained character to which would have been added an undeniable vividness of outlook. She could not have left them alone, so to speak. In obeying the mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated them. Unconsciously she had stimulated her fellow pupils at school; when she was his companion, her father had always felt himself stirred to interest and enterprise.

“You ought to have been a man, Betty,” he used to say to her sometimes.

But Betty had not agreed with him.

“You say that,” she once replied to him, “because you see I am inclined to do things, to change them, if they need changing. Well, one is either born like that, or one is not. Sometimes I think that perhaps the people who must ACT are of a distinct race. A kind of vigorous restlessness drives them. I remember that when I was a child I could not see a pin lying upon the ground without picking it up, or pass a drawer which needed closing, without giving it a push. But there has always been as much for women to do as for men.”

There was much to be done here of one sort of thing and another. That was certain. As she gazed through the small panes of her large windows, she found herself overlooking part of a wilderness of garden, which revealed itself through an arch in an overgrown laurel hedge. She had glimpses of unkempt grass paths and unclipped topiary work which had lost its original form. Among a tangle of weeds rose the heads of clumps of daffodils, stirred by a passing wind of spring. In the park beyond a cuckoo was calling.

She was conscious both of the forlorn beauty and significance of the neglected garden, and of the clear quaintness of the cuckoo call, as she thought of other things.

“Her spirit and her health are broken,” was her summing up. “Her prettiness has faded to a rag. She is as nervous as an ill-treated child. She has lost her wits. I do not know where to begin with her. I must let her tell me things as gradually as she chooses. Until I see Nigel I shall not know what his method with her has been. She looks as if she had ceased to care for things, even for herself. What shall I write to mother?”

She knew what she should write to her father. With him she could be explicit. She could record what she had found and what it suggested to her. She could also make clear her reason for hesitance and deliberation. His discretion and affection would comprehend the thing which she herself felt and which affection not combined with discretion might not take in. He would understand, when she told him that one of the first things which had struck her, had been that Rosy herself, her helplessness and timidity, might, for a period at least, form obstacles in their path of action. He not only loved Rosy, but realised how slight a sweet thing she had always been, and he would know how far a slight creature’s gentleness might be overpowered and beaten down.

There was so much that her mother must be spared, there was indeed so little that it would be wise to tell her, that Bettina sat gently rubbing her forehead as she thought of it. The truth was that she must tell her nothing, until all was over, accomplished, decided. Whatsoever there was to be “over,” whatsoever the action finally taken, must be a matter lying as far as possible between her father and herself. Mrs. Vanderpoel’s trouble would be too keen, her anxiety too great to keep to herself, even if she were not overwhelmed by them. She must be told of the beauties and dimensions of Stornham, all relatable details of Rosy’s life must be generously dwelt on. Above all Rosy must be made to write letters, and with an air of freedom however specious.

A knock on the door broke the thread of her reflection. It was a low-sounding knock, and she answered the summons herself, because she thought it might be Rosy’s.

It was not Lady Anstruthers who stood outside, but Ughtred, who balanced himself on his crutches, and lifted his small, too mature, face.

“May I come in?” he asked.

Here was the unexpected again, but she did not allow him to see her surprise.

“Yes,” she said. “Certainly you may.”

He swung in and then turned to speak to her.

“Please shut the door and lock it,” he said.

There was sudden illumination in this, but of an order almost whimsical. That modern people in modern days should feel bolts and bars a necessity of ordinary intercourse was suggestive. She was plainly about to receive enlightenment. She turned the key and followed the halting figure across the room.

“What are you afraid of?” she asked.

“When mother and I talk things over,” he said, “we always do it where no one can see or hear. It’s the only way to be safe.”

“Safe from what?”

His eyes fixed themselves on her as he answered her almost sullenly.

“Safe from people who might listen and go and tell that we had been talking.”

In his thwarted-looking, odd child-face there was a shade of appeal not wholly hidden by his evident wish not to be boylike. Betty felt a desire to kneel down suddenly and embrace him, but she knew he was not prepared for such a demonstration. He looked like a creature who had lived continually at bay, and had learned to adjust himself to any situation with caution and restraint.

“Sit down, Ughtred,” she said, and when he did so she herself sat down, but not too near him.

Resting his chin on the handle of a crutch, he gazed at her almost protestingly.

“I always have to do these things,” he said, “and I am not clever enough, or old enough. I am only eleven.”

The mention of the number of his years was plainly not apologetic, but was a mere statement of his limitations. There the fact was, and he must make the best of it he could.

“What things do you mean?”

“Trying to make things easier—explaining things when she cannot think of excuses. To-day it is telling you what she is too frightened to tell you herself. I said to her that you must be told. It made her nervous and miserable, but I knew you must.”

“Yes, I must,” Betty answered. “I am glad she has you to depend on, Ughtred.”

His crutch grated on the floor and his boy eyes forbade her to believe that their sudden lustre was in any way connected with restrained emotion.

“I know I seem queer and like a little old man,” he said. “Mother cries about it sometimes. But it can’t be helped. It is because she has never had anyone but me to help her. When I was very little, I found out how frightened and miserable she was. After his rages,” he used no name, “she used to run into my nursery and snatch me up in her arms and hide her face in my pinafore. Sometimes she stuffed it into her mouth and bit it to keep herself from screaming. Once— before I was seven—I ran into their room and shouted out, and tried to fight for her. He was going out, and had his riding whip in his hand, and he caught hold of me and struck me with it—until he was tired.”

Betty stood upright.

“What! What! What!” she cried out.

He merely nodded his head shortly. She saw what the thing had been by the way his face lost colour.

“Of course he said it was because I was impudent, and needed punishment,” he said. “He said she had encouraged me in American impudence. It was worse for her than for me. She kneeled down and screamed out as if she was crazy, that she would give him what he wanted if he would stop.”

“Wait,” said Betty, drawing in her breath sharply. ” `He,’ is Sir Nigel? And he wanted something.”

He nodded again

“Tell me,” she demanded, “has he ever struck her?”

“Once,” he answered slowly, “before I was born—he struck her and she fell against something. That is why I am like this.” And he touched his shoulder.

The feeling which surged through Betty Vanderpoel’s being forced her to go and stand with her face turned towards the windows, her hands holding each other tightly behind her back.

“I must keep still,” she said. “I must make myself keep still.”

She spoke unconsciously half aloud, and Ughtred heard her and replied hurriedly.

“Yes,” he said, “you must make yourself keep still. That is what we have to do whatever happens. That is one of the things mother wanted you to know. She is afraid. She daren’t let you–-“

She turned from the window, standing at her full height and looking very tall for a girl.

“She is afraid? She daren’t? See—that will come to an end now. There are things which can be done.”

He flushed nervously.

“That is what she was afraid you would say,” he spoke fast and his hands trembled. “She is nearly wild about it, because she knows he will try to do something that will make you feel as if she does not want you.”

“She is afraid of that?” Betty exclaimed.

“He’d do it! He’d do it—if you did not know beforehand.”

“Oh!” said Betty, with unflinching clearness. “He is a liar, is he?”

The helpless rage in the unchildish eyes, the shaking voice, as he cried out in answer, were a shock. It was as if he wildly rejoiced that she had spoken the word.

“Yes, he’s a liar—a liar!” he shrilled. “He’s a liar and a bully and a coward. He’d—he’d be a murderer if he dared —but he daren’t.” And his face dropped on his arms folded on his crutch, and he broke into a passion of crying. Then Betty knew she might go to him. She went and knelt down and put her arm round him.

“Ughtred,” she said, “cry, if you like, I should do it, if I were you. But I tell you it can all be altered—and it shall be.”

He seemed quite like a little boy when he put out his hand to hers and spoke sobbingly:

“She—she says—that because you have only just come from America—and in America people—can do things—you will think you can do things here—and you don’t know. He will tell lies about you lies you can’t bear. She sat wringing her hands when she thought of it. She won’t let you be hurt because you want to help her.” He stopped abruptly and clutched her shoulder.

“Aunt Betty! Aunt Betty—whatever happens—whatever he makes her seem like—you are to know that it is not true. Now you have come—now she has seen you it would KILL her if you were driven away and thought she wanted you to go.”

“I shall not think that,” she answered, slowly, because she realised that it was well that she had been warned in time. “Ughtred, are you trying to tell me that above all things I must not let him think that I came here to help you, because if he is angry he will make us all suffer—and your mother most of all?”

“He’ll find a way. We always know he will. He would either be so rude that you would not stay here—or he would make mother seem rude—or he would write lies to grandfather. Aunt Betty, she scarcely believes you are real yet. If she won’t tell you things at first, please don’t mind.” He looked quite like a child again in his appeal to her, to try to understand a state of affairs so complicated. “Could you— could you wait until you have let her get—get used to you?”

“Used to thinking that there may be someone in the world to help her?” slowly. “Yes, I will. Has anyone ever tried to help her?”

“Once or twice people found out and were sorry at first, but it only made it worse, because he made them believe things.”

“I shall not TRY, Ughtred,” said Betty, a remote spark kindling in the deeps of the pupils of her steel-blue eyes. “I shall not TRY. Now I am going to ask you some questions.”

Before he left her she had asked many questions which were pertinent and searching, and she had learned things she realised she could have learned in no other way and from no other person. But for his uncanny sense of the responsibility he clearly had assumed in the days when he wore pinafores, and which had brought him to her room to prepare her mind for what she would find herself confronted with in the way of apparently unexplainable obstacles, there was a strong likelihood that at the outset she might have found herself more than once dangerously at a loss. Yes, she would have been at a loss, puzzled, perhaps greatly discouraged. She was face to face with a complication so extraordinary.

That one man, through mere persistent steadiness in evil temper and domestic tyranny, should have so broken the creatures of his household into abject submission and hopelessness, seemed too incredible. Such a power appeared as remote from civilised existence in London and New York as did that which had inflicted tortures in the dungeons of castles of old. Prisoners in such dungeons could utter no cry which could reach the outside world; the prisoners at Stornham Court, not four hours from Hyde Park Corner, could utter none the world could hear, or comprehend if it heard it. Sheer lack of power to resist bound them hand and foot. And she, Betty Vanderpoel, was here upon the spot, and, as far as she could understand, was being implored to take no steps, to do nothing. The atmosphere in which she had spent her life, the world she had been born into, had not made for fearfulness that one would be at any time defenceless against circumstances and be obliged to submit to outrage. To be a Vanderpoel was, it was true, to be a shining mark for envy as for admiration, but the fact removed obstacles as a rule, and to find one’s self standing before a situation with one’s hands, figuratively speaking, tied, was new enough to arouse unusual sensations. She recalled, with an ironic sense of bewilderment, as a sort of material evidence of her own reality, the fact that not a week ago she had stepped on to English soil from the gangway of a solid Atlantic liner. It aided her to resist the feeling that she had been swept back into the Middle Ages.

“When he is angry,” was one of the first questions she put to Ughtred, “what does he give as his reason? He must profess to have a reason.”

“When he gets in a rage he says it is because mother is silly and common, and I am badly brought up. But we always know he wants money, and it makes him furious. He could kill us with rage.”

“Oh!” said Betty. “I see.”

“It began that time when he struck her. He said then that it was not decent that a woman who was married should keep her own money. He made her give him almost everything she had, but she wants to keep some for me. He tries to make her get more from grandfather, but she will not write begging letters, and she won’t give him what she is saving for me.”

It was a simple and sordid enough explanation in one sense, and it was one of which Bettina had known, not one parallel, but several. Having married to ensure himself power over unquestioned resources, the man had felt himself disgustingly taken in, and avenged himself accordingly. In him had been born the makings of a domestic tyrant who, even had he been favoured by fortune, would have wreaked his humours upon the defenceless things made his property by ties of blood and marriage, and who, being unfavoured, would do worse. Betty could see what the years had held for Rosy, and how her weakness and timidity had been considered as positive assets. A woman who will cry when she is bullied, may be counted upon to submit after she has cried. Rosy had submitted up to a certain point and then, with the stubbornness of a weak creature, had stood at timid bay for her young.

What Betty gathered was that, after the long and terrible illness which had followed Ughtred’s birth, she had risen from what had been so nearly her deathbed, prostrated in both mind and body. Ughtred did not know all that he revealed when he touched upon the time which he said his mother could not quite remember—when she had sat for months staring vacantly out of her window, trying to recall something terrible which had happened, and which she wanted to tell her mother, if the day ever came when she could write to her again. She had never remembered clearly the details of the thing she had wanted to tell, and Nigel had insisted that her fancy was part of her past delirium. He had said that at the beginning of her delirium she had attacked and insulted his mother and himself but they had excused her because they realised afterwards what the cause of her excitement had been. For a long time she had been too brokenly weak to question or disbelieve, but, later she had vaguely known that he had been lying to her, though she could not refute what he said. She recalled, in course of time, a horrible scene in which all three of them had raved at each other, and she herself had shrieked and laughed and hurled wild words at Nigel, and he had struck her. That she knew and never forgot. She had been ill a year, her hair had fallen out, her skin had faded and she had begun to feel like a nervous, tired old woman instead of a girl. Girlhood, with all the past, had become unreal and too far away to be more than a dream. Nothing had remained real but Stornham and Nigel and the little hunchbacked baby. She was glad when the Dowager died and when Nigel spent his time in London or on the Continent and left her with Ughtred. When he said that he must spend her money on the estate, she had acquiesced without comment, because that insured his going away. She saw that no improvement or repairs were made, but she could do nothing and was too listless to make the attempt. She only wanted to be left alone with Ughtred, and she exhibited will-power only in defence of her child and in her obstinacy with regard to asking money of her father.

“She thought, somehow, that grandfather and grandmother did not care for her any more—that they had forgotten her and only cared for you,” Ughtred explained. “She used to talk to me about you. She said you must be so clever and so handsome that no one could remember her. Sometimes she cried and said she did not want any of you to see her again, because she was only a hideous, little, thin, yellow old woman. When I was very little she told me stories about New York and Fifth Avenue. I thought they were not real places—I though they were places in fairyland.”

Betty patted his shoulder and looked away for a moment when he said this. In her remote and helpless loneliness, to Rosy’s homesick, yearning soul, noisy, rattling New York, Fifth Avenue with its traffic and people, its brownstone houses and ricketty stages, had seemed like THAT—so splendid and bright and heart-filling, that she had painted them in colours which could belong only to fairyland. It said so much.

The thing she had suspected as she had talked to her sister was, before the interview ended, made curiously clear. The first obstacle in her pathway would be the shrinking of a creature who had been so long under dominion that the mere thought of seeing any steps taken towards her rescue filled her with alarm. One might be prepared for her almost praying to be let alone, because she felt that the process of her salvation would bring about such shocks and torments as she could not endure the facing of.

“She will have to get used to you,” Ughtred kept saying. “She will have to get used to thinking things.”

“I will be careful,” Bettina answered. “She shall not be troubled. I did not come to trouble her,”

CHAPTER XIII

ONE OF THE NEW YORK DRESSES

As she went down the staircase later, on her way to dinner, Miss Vanderpoel saw on all sides signs of the extent of the nakedness of the land. She was in a fine old house, stripped of most of its saleable belongings, uncared for, deteriorating year by year, gradually going to ruin. One need not possess particular keenness of sight to observe this, and she had chanced to see old houses in like condition in other countries than England. A manservant, in a shabby livery, opened the drawing-room door for her. He was not a picturesque servitor of fallen fortunes, but an awkward person who was not accustomed to his duties. Betty wondered if he had been called in from the gardens to meet the necessities of the moment. His furtive glance at the tall young woman who passed him, took in with sudden embarrassment the fact that she plainly did not belong to the dispirited world bounded by Stornham Court. Without sparkling gems or trailing richness in her wake, she was suggestively splendid. He did not know whether it was her hair or the build of her neck and shoulders that did it, but it was revealed to him that tiaras and collars of stones which blazed belonged without doubt to her equipment. He recalled that there was a legend to the effect that the present Lady Anstruthers, who looked like a rag doll, had been the daughter of a rich American, and that better things might have been expected of her if she had not been such a poor-spirited creature. If this was her sister, she perhaps was a young woman of fortune, and that she was not of poor spirit was plain.

The large drawing-room presented but another aspect of the bareness of the rest of the house. In times probably long past, possibly in the Dowager Lady Anstruthers’ early years of marriage, the walls had been hung with white and gold paper of a pattern which dominated the scene, and had been furnished with gilded chairs, tables, and ottomans. Some of these last had evidently been removed as they became too much out of repair for use or ornament. Such as remained, tarnished as to gilding and worn in the matter of upholstery, stood sparsely scattered on a desert of carpet, whose huge, flowered medallions had faded almost from view.

Lady Anstruthers, looking shy and awkward as she fingered an ornament on a small table, seemed singularly a part of her background. Her evening dress, slipping off her thin shoulders, was as faded and out of date as her carpet. It had once been delicately blue and gauzy, but its gauziness hung in crushed folds and its blue was almost grey. It was also the dress of a girl, not that of a colourless, worn woman, and her consciousness of its unfitness showed in her small-featured face as she came forward.

“Do you—recognise it, Betty?” she asked hesitatingly. “It was one of my New York dresses. I put it on because— because–-” and her stammering ended helplessly.

“Because you wanted to remind me,” Betty said. If she felt it easier to begin with an excuse she should be provided with one.

Perhaps but for this readiness to fall into any tone she chose to adopt Rosy might have endeavoured to carry her poor farce on, but as it was she suddenly gave it up.

“I put it on because I have no other,” she said. “We never have visitors and I haven’t dressed for dinner for so long that I seem to have nothing left that is fit to wear. I dragged this out because it was better than anything else. It was pretty once–-” she gave a little laugh, “twelve years ago. How long years seem! Was I—was I pretty, Betty—twelve years ago?”

“Twelve years is not such a long time.” Betty took her hand and drew her to a sofa. “Let us sit down and talk about it.”

“There is nothing much to talk about. This is it–-” taking in the room with a wave of her hand. “I am it. Ughtred is it.”

“Then let us talk about England,” was Bettina’s light skim over the thin ice.

A red spot grew on each of Lady Anstruthers’ cheek bones and made her faded eyes look intense.

“Let us talk about America,” her little birdclaw of a hand clinging feverishly. “Is New York still—still–-“

“It is still there,” Betty answered with one of the adorable smiles which showed a deep dimple near her lip. “But it is much nearer England than it used to be.”

“Nearer!” The hand tightened as Rosy caught her breath.

Betty bent rather suddenly and kissed her. It was the easiest way of hiding the look she knew had risen to her eyes. She began to talk gaily, half laughingly.

“It is quite near,” she said. “Don’t you realise it? Americans swoop over here by thousands every year. They come for business, they come for pleasure, they come for rest. They cannot keep away. They come to buy and sell—pictures and books and luxuries and lands. They come to give and take. They are building a bridge from shore to shore of their work, and their thoughts, and their plannings, out of the lives and souls of them. It will be a great bridge and great things will pass over it.” She kissed the faded cheek again. She wanted to sweep Rosy away from the dreariness of “it.” Lady Anstruthers looked at her with faintly smiling eyes. She did not follow all this quite readily, but she felt pleased and vaguely comforted.

“I know how they come here and marry,” she said. “The new Duchess of Downes is an American. She had a fortune of two million pounds.”

“If she chooses to rebuild a great house and a great name,” said Betty, lifting her shoulders lightly, “why not—if it is an honest bargain? I suppose it is part of the building of the bridge.”

Little Lady Anstruthers, trying to pull up the sleeves of the gauzy bodice slipping off her small, sharp bones, stared at her half in wondering adoration, half in alarm.

“Betty—you—you are so handsome—and so clever and strange,” she fluttered. “Oh, Betty, stand up so that I can see how tall and handsome you are!”

Betty did as she was told, and upon her feet she was a young woman of long lines, and fine curves so inspiring to behold that Lady Anstruthers clasped her hands together on her knees in an excited gesture.

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes!” she cried. “You are just as wonderful as you looked when I turned and saw you under the trees. You almost make me afraid.”

“Because I am wonderful?” said Betty. “Then I will not be wonderful any more.”

“It is not because I think you wonderful, but because other people will. Would you rebuild a great house?” hesitatingly.

The fine line of Betty’s black brows drew itself slightly together.

“No,” she said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“How could the man who owned it persuade me that he was in earnest if he said he loved me? How could I persuade him that I was worth caring for and not a mere ambitious fool? There would be too much against us.”

“Against you?” repeated Lady Anstruthers.

“I don’t say I am fair,” said Betty. “People who are proud are often not fair. But we should both of us have seen and known too much.”

“You have seen me now,” said Lady Anstruthers in her listless voice, and at the same moment dinner was announced and she got up from the sofa, so that, luckily, there was no time for the impersonal answer it would have been difficult to invent at a moment’s notice. As they went into the dining-room Betty was thinking restlessly. She remembered all the material she had collected during her education in France and Germany, and there was added to it the fact that she HAD seen Rosy, and having her before her eyes she felt that there was small prospect of her contemplating the rebuilding of any great house requiring reconstruction.

There was fine panelling in the dining-room and a great fireplace and a few family portraits. The service upon the table was shabby and the dinner was not a bounteous meal. Lady Anstruthers in her girlish, gauzy dress and looking too small for her big, high-backed chair tried to talk rapidly, and every few minutes forgot herself and sank into silence, with her eyes unconsciously fixed upon her sister’s face. Ughtred watched Betty also, and with a hungry questioning. The manservant in the worn livery was not a sufficiently well-trained and experienced domestic to make any effort to keep his eyes from her. He was young enough to be excited by an innovation so unusual as the presence of a young and beautiful person surrounded by an unmistakable atmosphere of ease and fearlessness. He had been talking of her below stairs and felt that he had failed in describing her. He had found himself barely supported by the suggestion of a housemaid that sometimes these dresses that looked plain had been made in Paris at expensive places and had cost “a lot.” He furtively examined the dress which looked plain, and while he admitted that for some mysterious reason it might represent expensiveness, it was not the dress which was the secret of the effect, but a something, not altogether mere good looks, expressed by the wearer. It was, in fact, the thing which the second-class passenger, Salter, had been at once attracted and stirred to rebellion by when Miss Vanderpoel came on board the Meridiana.

Betty did not look too small for her high-backed chair, and she did not forget herself when she talked. In spite of all she had found, her imagination was stirred by the surroundings. Her sense of the fine spaces and possibilities of dignity in the barren house, her knowledge that outside the windows there lay stretched broad views of the park and its heavy-branched trees, and that outside the gates stood the neglected picturesqueness of the village and all the rural and—to her— interesting life it slowly lived—this pleased and attracted her.

If she had been as helpless and discouraged as Rosalie she could see that it would all have meant a totally different and depressing thing, but, strong and spirited, and with the power of full hands, she was remotely rejoicing in what might be done with it all. As she talked she was gradually learning detail. Sir Nigel was on the Continent. Apparently he often went there; also it revealed itself that no one knew at what moment he might return, for what reason he would return, or if he would return at all during the summer. It was evident that no one had been at any time encouraged to ask questions as to his intentions, or to feel that they had a right to do so.

This she knew, and a number of other things, before they left the table. When they did so they went out to stroll upon the moss-grown stone terrace and listened to the nightingales throwingminto the air silver fountains of trilling song. When Bettinapaused, leaning against the balustrade of the terrace that she might hear all the beauty of it, and feel all the beauty of the warm spring night, Rosy went on making her effort to talk.

“It is not much of a neighbourhood, Betty,” she said. “You are too accustomed to livelier places to like it.”

“That is my reason for feeling that I shall like it. I don’t think I could be called a lively person, and I rather hate lively places.”

“But you are accustomed—accustomed–-” Rosy harked back uncertainly.

“I have been accustomed to wishing that I could come to you,” said Betty. “And now I am here.”

Lady Anstruthers laid a hand on her dress.

“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” she breathed.

“You will believe it,” said Betty, drawing the hand around her waist and enclosing in her own arm the narrow shoulders. “Tell me about the neighbourhood.”

“There isn’t any, really,” said Lady Anstruthers. “The houses are so far away from each other. The nearest is six miles from here, and it is one that doesn’t count.

“Why?”

“There is no family, and the man who owns it is so poor. It is a big place, but it is falling to pieces as this is.

“What is it called?”

“Mount Dunstan. The present earl only succeeded about three years ago. Nigel doesn’t know him. He is queer and not liked. He has been away.”

“Where?”

“No one knows. To Australia or somewhere. He has odd ideas. The Mount Dunstans have been awful people for two generations. This man’s father was almost mad with wickedness. So was the elder son. This is a second son, and he came into nothing but debt. Perhaps he feels the disgrace and it makes him rude and ill-tempered. His father and elder brother had been in such scandals that people did not invite them.

“Do they invite this man?”

“No. He probably would not go to their houses if they did. And he went away soon after he came into the title.”

“Is the place beautiful?”

“There is a fine deer park, and the gardens were wonderful a long time ago. The house is worth looking at—outside.”

“I will go and look at it,” said Betty.

“The carriage is out of order. There is only Ughtred’s cart.”

“I am a good walker,” said Betty.

“Are you? It would be twelve miles—there and back. When I was in New York people didn’t walk much, particularly girls.”

“They do now,” Betty answered. “They have learned to do it in England. They live out of doors and play games. They have grown athletic and tall.”

As they talked the nightingales sang, sometimes near, sometimes in the distance, and scents of dewy grass and leaves and earth were wafted towards them. Sometimes they strolled up and down the terrace, sometimes they paused and leaned against the stone balustrade. Betty allowed Rosy to talk as she chose. She herself asked no obviously leading questions and passed over trying moments with lightness. Her desire was to place herself in a position where she might hear the things which would aid her to draw conclusions. Lady Anstruthers gradually grew less nervous and afraid of her subjects. In the wonder of the luxury of talking to someone who listened with sympathy, she once or twice almost forgot herself and made revelations she had not intended to make. She had often the manner of a person who was afraid of being overheard; sometimes, even when she was making speeches quite simple in themselves, her voice dropped and she glanced furtively aside as if there were chances that something she dreaded might step out of the shadow.

When they went upstairs together and parted for the night, the clinging of Rosy’s embrace was for a moment almost convulsive. But she tried to laugh off its suggestion of intensity.

“I held you tight so that I could feel sure that you were real and would not melt away,” she said. “I hope you will be here in the morning.”

“I shall never really go quite away again, now I have come,” Betty answered. “It is not only your house I have come into. I have come back into your life.”

After she had entered her room and locked the door she sat down and wrote a letter to her father. It was a long letter, but a clear one. She painted a definite and detailed picture and made distinct her chief point.

“She is afraid of me,” she wrote. “That is the first and worst obstacle. She is actually afraid that I will do something which will only add to her trouble. She has lived under dominion so long that she has forgotten that there are people who have no reason for fear. Her old life seems nothing but a dream. The first thing I must teach her is that I am to be trusted not to do futile things, and that she need neither be afraid of nor for me.”

After writing these sentences she found herself leaving her desk and walking up and down the room to relieve herself. She could not sit still, because suddenly the blood ran fast and hot through her veins. She put her hands against her cheeks and laughed a little, low laugh.

“I feel violent,” she said. “I feel violent and I must get over it. This is rage. Rage is worth nothing.”

It was rage—the rage of splendid hot blood which surged in answer to leaping hot thoughts. There would have been a sort of luxury in giving way to the sway of it. But the self-indulgence would have been no aid to future action. Rage was worth nothing. She said it as the first Reuben Vanderpoel might have said of a useless but glittering weapon. “This gun is worth nothing,” and cast it aside.

CHAPTER XIV

IN THE GARDENS

She came out upon the stone terrace again rather early in the morning. She wanted to wander about in the first freshness of the day, which was always an uplifting thing to her. She wanted to see the dew on the grass and on the ragged flower borders and to hear the tender, broken fluting of birds in the trees. One cuckoo was calling to another in the park, and she stopped and listened intently. Until yesterday she had never heard a cuckoo call, and its hollow mellowness gave her delight. It meant the spring in England, and nowhere else.

There was space enough to ramble about in the gardens. Paths and beds were alike overgrown with weeds, but some strong, early-blooming things were fighting for life, refusing to be strangled. Against the beautiful old red walls, over which age had stolen with a wonderful grey bloom, venerable fruit trees were spread and nailed, and here and there showed bloom, clumps of low-growing things sturdily advanced their yellowness or whiteness, as if defying neglect. In one place a wall slanted and threatened to fall, bearing its nectarine trees with it; in another there was a gap so evidently not of to-day that the heap of its masonry upon the border bed was already covered with greenery, and the roots of the fruit tree it had supported had sent up strong, insistent shoots.

She passed down broad paths and narrow ones, sometimes walking under trees, sometimes pushing her way between encroaching shrubs; she descended delightful mossy and broken steps and came upon dilapidated urns, in which weeds grew instead of flowers, and over which rampant but lovely, savage little creepers clambered and clung.

In one of the walled kitchen gardens she came upon an elderly gardener at work. At the sound of her approaching steps he glanced round and then stood up, touching his forelock in respectful but startled salute. He was so plainly amazed at the sight of her that she explained herself.

“Good-morning,” she said. “I am her ladyship’s sister, Miss Vanderpoel. I came yesterday evening. I am looking over your gardens.”

He touched his forehead again and looked round him. His manner was not cheerful. He cast a troubled eye about him.

“They’re not much to see, miss,” he said. “They’d ought to be, but they’re not. Growing things has to be fed and took care of. A man and a boy can’t do it—nor yet four or five of ‘em.”

“How many ought there to be?” Betty inquired, with businesslike directness. It was not only the dew on the grass she had come out to see.

“If there was eight or ten of us we might put it in order and keep it that way. It’s a big place, miss.”

Betty looked about her as he had done, but with a less discouraged eye.

“It is a beautiful place, as well as a large one,” she said. “I can see that there ought to be more workers.”

“There’s no one,” said the gardener, “as has as many enemies as a gardener, an’ as many things to fight. There’s grubs an’ there’s greenfly, an’ there’s drout’, an’ wet an’ cold, an’ mildew, an’ there’s what the soil wants and starves without, an’ if you haven’t got it nor yet hands an’ feet an’ tools enough, how’s things to feed, an’ fight an’ live—let alone bloom an’ bear?”

“I don’t know much about gardens,” said Miss Vanderpoel, “but I can understand that.”

The scent of fresh bedewed things was in the air. It was true that she had not known much about gardens, but here standing in the midst of one she began to awaken to a new, practical interest. A creature of initiative could not let such a place as this alone. It was beauty being slowly slain. One could not pass it by and do nothing.

“What is your name?” she asked

“Kedgers, miss. I’ve only been here about a twelve-month. I was took on because I’m getting on in years an’ can’t ask much wage.”

“Can you spare time to take me through the gardens and show me things?”

Yes, he could do it. In truth, he privately welcomed an opportunity offering a prospect of excitement so novel. He had shown more flourishing gardens to other young ladies in his past years of service, but young ladies did not come to Stornham, and that one having, with such extraordinary unexpectedness arrived, should want to look over the desolation of these, was curious enough to rouse anyone to a sense of a break in accustomed monotony. The young lady herself mystified him by her difference from such others as he had seen. What the man in the shabby livery had felt, he felt also, and added to this was a sense of the practicalness of the questions she asked and the interest she showed and a way she had of seeming singularly to suggest by the look in her eyes and the tone of her voice that nothing was necessarily without remedy. When her ladyship walked through the place and looked at things, a pale resignation expressed itself in the very droop of her figure. When this one walked through the tumbled-down grape-houses, potting-sheds and conservatories, she saw where glass was broken, where benches had fallen and where roofs sagged and leaked. She inquired about the heating apparatus and asked that she might see it. She asked about the village and its resources, about labourers and their wages.

“As if,” commented Kedgers mentally, “she was what Sir Nigel is—leastways what he’d ought to be an’ ain’t.”

She led the way back to the fallen wall and stood and looked at it.

“It’s a beautiful old wall,” she said. “It should be rebuilt with the old brick. New would spoil it.”

“Some of this is broken and crumbled away,” said Kedgers, picking up a piece to show it to her.

“Perhaps old brick could be bought somewhere,” replied the young lady speculatively. “One ought to be able to buy old brick in England, if one is willing to pay for it.”

Kedgers scratched his head and gazed at her in respectful wonder which was almost trouble. Who was going to pay for things, and who was going to look for things which were not on the spot? Enterprise like this was not to be explained.

When she left him he stood and watched her upright figure disappear through the ivy-grown door of the kitchen gardens with a disturbed but elated expression on his countenance. He did not know why he felt elated, but he was conscious of elation. Something new had walked into the place. He stopped his work and grinned and scratched his head several times after he went back to his pottering among the cabbage plants.

“My word,” he muttered. “She’s a fine, straight young woman. If she was her ladyship things ‘ud be different. Sir Nigel ‘ud be different, too—or there’d be some fine upsets.”

There was a huge stable yard, and Betty passed through that on her way back. The door of the carriage house was open and she saw two or three tumbled-down vehicles. One was a landau with a wheel off, one was a shabby, old-fashioned, low phaeton. She caught sight of a patently venerable cob in one of the stables. The stalls near him were empty.

“I suppose that is all they have to depend upon,” she thought. “And the stables are like the gardens.”

She found Lady Anstruthers and Ughtred waiting for her upon the terrace, each of them regarding her with an expression suggestive of repressed curiosity as she approached. Lady Anstruthers flushed a little and went to meet her with an eager kiss.

“You look like—I don’t know quite what you look like, Betty!” she exclaimed.

The girl’s dimple deepened and her eyes said smiling things.

“It is the morning—and your gardens,” she answered. “I have been round your gardens.”

“They were beautiful once, I suppose,” said Rosy deprecatingly.

“They are beautiful now. There is nothing like them in America at least.”

“I don’t remember any gardens in America,” Lady Anstruthers owned reluctantly, “but everything seemed so cheerful and well cared for and—and new. Don’t laugh, Betty. I have begun to like new things. You would if you had watched old ones tumbling to pieces for twelve years.”

“They ought not to be allowed to tumble to pieces,” said Betty. She added her next words with simple directness. She could only discover how any advancing steps would be taken by taking them. “Why do you allow them to do it?”

Lady Anstruthers looked away, but as she looked her eyes passed Ughtred’s.

“I!” she said. “There are so many other things to do. It would cost so much—such an enormity to keep it all in order.”

“But it ought to be done—for Ughtred’s sake.”

“I know that,” faltered Rosy, “but I can’t help it.”

“You can,” answered Betty, and she put her arm round her as they turned to enter the house. “When you have become more used to me and my driving American ways I will show you how.”

The lightness with which she said it had an odd effect on Lady Anstruthers. Such casual readiness was so full of the suggestion of unheard of possibilities that it was a kind of shock.

“I have been twelve years in getting un-used to you—I feel as if it would take twelve years more to get used again,” she said.

“It won’t take twelve weeks,” said Betty.

CHAPTER XV

THE FIRST MAN

The mystery of the apparently occult methods of communication among the natives of India, between whom, it is said, news flies by means too strange and subtle to be humanly explainable, is no more difficult a problem to solve than that of the lightning rapidity with which a knowledge of the transpiring of any new local event darts through the slowest, and, as far as outward signs go, the least communicative English village slumbering drowsily among its pastures and trees.

That which the Hall or Manor House believed last night, known only to the four walls of its drawing-room, is discussed over the cottage breakfast tables as though presented in detail through the columns of the Morning Post. The vicarage, the smithy, the post office, the little provision shop, are instantaneously informed as by magic of such incidents of interest as occur, and are prepared to assist vicariously at any future developments. Through what agency information is given no one can tell, and, indeed, the agency is of small moment. Facts of interest are perhaps like flights of swallows and dart chattering from one red roof to another, proclaiming themselves aloud. Nothing is so true as that in such villages they are the property and innocent playthings of man, woman, and child, providing conversation and drama otherwise likely to be lacked.

When Miss Vanderpoel walked through Stornham village street she became aware that she was an exciting object of interest. Faces appeared at cottage windows, women sauntered to doors, men in the taproom of the Clock Inn left beer mugs to cast an eye on her; children pushed open gates and stared as they bobbed their curtsies; the young woman who kept the shop left her counter and came out upon her door step to pick up her straying baby and glance over its shoulder at the face with the red mouth, and the mass of black hair rolled upward under a rough blue straw hat. Everyone knew who this exotic-looking young lady was. She had arrived yesterday from London, and a week ago by means of a ship from far-away America, from the country in connection with which the rural mind curiously mixed up large wages, great fortunes and Indians. “Gaarge” Lunsden, having spent five years of his youth labouring heavily for sixteen shillings a week, had gone to “Meriker” and had earned there eight shillings a day. This was a well-known and much-talked over fact, and had elevated the western continent to a position of trust and importance it had seriously lacked before the emigration of Lunsden. A place where a man could earn eight shillings a day inspired interest as well as confidence. When Sir Nigel’s wife had arrived twelve years ago as the new Lady Anstruthers, the story that she herself “had money” had been verified by her fine clothes and her way of handing out sovereigns in cases where the rest of the gentry, if they gave at all, would have bestowed tea and flannel or shillings. There had been for a few months a period of unheard of well-being in Stornham village; everyone remembered the hundred pounds the bride had given to poor Wilson when his place had burned down, but the village had of course learned, by its occult means, that Sir Nigel and the Dowager had been angry and that there had been a quarrel. Afterwards her ladyship had been dangerously ill, the baby had been born a hunchback, and a year had passed before its mother had been seen again. Since then she had been a changed creature; she had lost her looks and seemed to care for nothing but the child. Stornham village saw next to nothing of her, and it certainly was not she who had the dispensing of her fortune. Rumour said Sir Nigel lived high in London and foreign parts, but there was no high living at the Court. Her ladyship’s family had never been near her, and belief in them and their wealth almost ceased to exist. If they were rich, Stornham felt that it was their business to mend roofs and windows and not allow chimneys and kitchen boilers to fall into ruin, the simple, leading article of faith being that even American money belonged properly to England.

As Miss Vanderpoel walked at a light, swinging pace through the one village street the gazers felt with Kedgers that something new was passing and stirring the atmosphere. She looked straight, and with a friendliness somehow dominating, at the curious women; her handsome eyes met those of the men in a human questioning; she smiled and nodded to the bobbing children. One of these, young enough to be uncertain on its feet, in running to join some others stumbled and fell on the path before her. Opening its mouth in the inevitable resultant roar, it was shocked almost into silence by the tall young lady stooping at once, picking it up, and cheerfully dusting its pinafore.

“Don’t cry,” she said; “you are not hurt, you know.”

The deep dimple near her mouth showed itself, and the laugh in her eyes was so reassuring that the penny she put into the grubby hand was less productive of effect than her mere self. She walked on, leaving the group staring after her breathless, because of a sense of having met with a wonderful adventure. The grand young lady with the black hair and the blue hat and tall, straight body was the adventure. She left the same sense of event with the village itself. They talked of her all day over their garden palings, on their doorsteps, in the street; of her looks, of her height, of the black rim of lashes round her eyes, of the chance that she might be rich and ready to give half-crowns and sovereigns, of the “Meriker” she had come from, and above all of the reason for her coming.

Betty swung with the light, firm step of a good walker out on to the highway. To walk upon the fine, smooth old Roman road was a pleasure in itself, but she soon struck away from it and went through lanes and by-ways, following signposts because she knew where she was going. Her walk was to take her to Mount Dunstan and home again by another road. In walking, an objective point forms an interest, and what she had heard of the estate from Rosalie was a vague reason for her caring to see it. It was another place like Stornham, once dignified and nobly representative of fine things, now losing their meanings and values. Values and meanings, other than mere signs of wealth and power, there had been. Centuries ago strong creatures had planned and built it for such reasons as strength has for its planning and building. In Bettina Vanderpoel’s imagination the First Man held powerful and moving sway. It was he whom she always saw. In history, as a child at school, she had understood and drawn close to him. There was always a First Man behind all that one saw or was told, one who was the fighter, the human thing who snatched weapons and tools from stones and trees and wielded them in the carrying out of the thought which was his possession and his strength. He was the God made human; others waited, without knowledge of their waiting, for the signal he gave. A man like others—with man’s body, hands, and limbs, and eyes— the moving of a whole world was subtly altered by his birth. One could not always trace him, but with stone axe and spear point he had won savage lands in savage ways, and so ruled them that, leaving them to other hands, their march towards less savage life could not stay itself, but must sweep on; others of his kind, striking rude harps, had so sung that the loud clearness of their wild songs had rung through the ages, and echo still in strains which are theirs, though voices of to-day repeat the note of them. The First Man, a Briton stained with woad and hung with skins, had tilled the luscious greenness of the lands richly rolling now within hedge boundaries. The square church towers rose, holding their slender corner spires above the trees, as a result of the First Man, Norman William. The thought which held its place, the work which did not pass away, had paid its First Man wages; but beauties crumbling, homes falling to waste, were bitter things. The First Man, who, having won his splendid acres, had built his home upon them and reared his young and passed his possession on with a proud heart, seemed but ill treated. Through centuries the home had enriched itself, its acres had borne harvests, its trees had grown and spread huge branches, full lives had been lived within the embrace of the massive walls, there had been loves and lives and marriages and births, the breathings of them made warm and full the very air. To Betty it seemed that the land itself would have worn another face if it had not been trodden by so many springing feet, if so many harvests had not waved above it, if so many eyes had not looked upon and loved it.

She passed through variations of the rural loveliness she had seen on her way from the station to the Court, and felt them grow in beauty as she saw them again. She came at last to a village somewhat larger than Stornham and marked by the signs of the lack of money-spending care which Stornham showed. Just beyond its limits a big park gate opened on to an avenue of massive trees. She stopped and looked down it, but could see nothing but its curves and, under the branches, glimpses of a spacious sweep of park with other trees standing in groups or alone in the sward. The avenue was unswept and untended, and here and there boughs broken off by wind

storms lay upon it. She turned to the road again and followed it, because it enclosed the park and she wanted to see more of its evident beauty. It was very beautiful. As she walked on she saw it rolled into woods and deeps filled with bracken; she saw stretches of hillocky, fine-grassed rabbit warren, and hollows holding shadowy pools; she caught the gleam of a lake with swans sailing slowly upon it with curved necks; there were wonderful lights and wonderful shadows, and brooding stillness, which made her footfall upon the road a too material thing.

Suddenly she heard a stirring in the bracken a yard or two away from her. Something was moving slowly among the waving masses of huge fronds and caused them to sway to and fro. It was an antlered stag who rose from his bed in the midst of them, and with majestic deliberation got upon his feet and stood gazing at her with a calmness of pose so splendid, and a liquid darkness and lustre of eye so stilly and fearlessly beautiful, that she caught her breath. He simply gazed as her as a great king might gaze at an intruder, scarcely deigning wonder.

As she had passed on her way, Betty had seen that the enclosing park palings were decaying, covered with lichen and falling at intervals. It had even passed through her mind that here was one of the demands for expenditure on a large estate, which limited resources could not confront with composure. The deer fence itself, a thing of wire ten feet high, to form an obstacle to leaps, she had marked to be in such condition as to threaten to become shortly a useless thing. Until this moment she had seen no deer, but looking beyond the stag and across the sward she now saw groups near each other, stags cropping or looking towards her with lifted heads, does at a respectful but affectionate distance from them, some caring for their fawns. The stag who had risen near her had merely walked through a gap in the boundary and now stood free to go where he would.

“He will get away,” said Betty, knitting her black brows. Ah! what a shame!

Even with the best intentions one could not give chase to a stag. She looked up and down the road, but no one was within sight. Her brows continued to knit themselves and her eyes ranged over the park itself in the hope that some labourer on the estate, some woodman or gamekeeper, might be about.

“It is no affair of mine,” she said, “but it would be too bad to let him get away, though what happens to stray stags one doesn’t exactly know.”

As she said it she caught sight of someone, a man in leggings and shabby clothes and with a gun over his shoulder, evidently an under keeper. He was a big, rather rough-looking fellow, but as he lurched out into the open from a wood Betty saw that she could reach him if she passed through a narrow gate a few yards away and walked quickly.

He was slouching along, his head drooping and his broad shoulders expressing the definite antipodes of good spirits. Betty studied his back as she strode after him, her conclusion being that he was perhaps not a good-humoured man to approach at any time, and that this was by ill luck one of his less fortunate hours.

“Wait a moment, if you please,” her clear, mellow voice flung out after him when she was within hearing distance. “I want to speak to you, keeper.”

He turned with an air of far from pleased surprise. The afternoon sun was in his eyes and made him scowl. For a moment he did not see distinctly who was approaching him, but he had at once recognised a certain cool tone of command in the voice whose suddenness had roused him from a black mood. A few steps brought them to close quarters, and when he found himself looking into the eyes of his pursuer he made a movement as if to lift his cap, then checking himself, touched it, keeper fashion.

“Oh!” he said shortly. “Miss Vanderpoel! Beg pardon.”

Bettina stood still a second. She had her surprise also. Here was the unexpected again. The under keeper was the red-haired second-class passenger of the Meridiana.

He did not look pleased to see her, and the suddenness of his appearance excluded the possibility of her realising that upon the whole she was at least not displeased to see him.

“How do you do?” she said, feeling the remark fantastically conventional, but not being inspired by any alternative. “I came to tell you that one of the stags has got through a gap in the fence.”

“Damn!” she heard him say under his breath. Aloud he said, “Thank you.”

“He is a splendid creature,” she said. “I did not know what to do. I was glad to see a keeper coming.”

“Thank you,” he said again, and strode towards the place where the stag still stood gazing up the road, as if reflecting as to whether it allured him or not.

Betty walked back more slowly, watching him with interest. She wondered what he would find it necessary to do. She heard him begin a low, flute-like whistling, and then saw the antlered head turn towards him. The woodland creature moved, but it was in his direction. It had without doubt answered his call before and knew its meaning to be friendly. It went towards him, stretching out a tender sniffing nose, and he put his hand in the pocket of his rough coat and gave it something to eat. Afterwards he went to the gap in the fence and drew the wires together, fastening them with other wire, which he also took out of the coat pocket.

“He is not afraid of making himself useful,” thought Betty. “And the animals know him. He is not as bad as he looks.”

She lingered a moment watching him, and then walked towards the gate through which she had entered. He glanced up as she neared him.

“I don’t see your carriage,” he said. “Your man is probably round the trees.”

“I walked,” answered Betty. “I had heard of this place and wanted to see it.”

He stood up, putting his wire back into his pocket.

“There is not much to be seen from the road,” he said. “Would you like to see more of it?”

His manner was civil enough, but not the correct one for a servant. He did not say “miss” or touch his cap in making the suggestion. Betty hesitated a moment.

“Is the family at home?” she inquired.

“There is no family but—his lordship. He is off the place.”

“Does he object to trespassers?”

“Not if they are respectable and take no liberties.”

“I am respectable, and I shall not take liberties,” said Miss Vanderpoel, with a touch of hauteur. The truth was that she had spent a sufficient number of years on the Continent to have become familiar with conventions which led her not to approve wholly of his bearing. Perhaps he had lived long enough in America to forget such conventions and to lack something which centuries of custom had decided should belong to his class. A certain suggestion of rough force in the man rather attracted her, and her slight distaste for his manner arose from the realisation that a gentleman’s servant who did not address his superiors as was required by custom was not doing his work in a finished way. In his place she knew her own demeanour would have been finished.

“If you are sure that Lord Mount Dunstan would not object to my walking about, I should like very much to see the gardens and the house,” she said. “If you show them to me, shall I be interfering with your duties?”

“No,” he answered, and then for the first time rather glumly added, “miss.”

“I am interested,” she said, as they crossed the grass together, “because places like this are quite new to me. I have never been in England before.”

“There are not many places like this,” he answered, “not many as old and fine, and not many as nearly gone to ruin. Even Stornham is not quite as far gone.”

“It is far gone,” said Miss Vanderpoel. “I am staying there—with my sister, Lady Anstruthers.”

“Beg pardon—miss,” he said. This time he touched his cap in apology.

Enormous as the gulf between their positions was, he knew that he had offered to take her over the place because he was in a sense glad to see her again. Why he was glad he did not profess to know or even to ask himself. Coarsely speaking, it might be because she was one of the handsomest young women he had ever chanced to meet with, and while her youth was apparent in the rich red of her mouth, the mass of her thick, soft hair and the splendid blue of her eyes, there spoke in every line of face and pose something intensely more interesting and compelling than girlhood. Also, since the night they had come together on the ship’s deck for an appalling moment, he had liked her better and rebelled less against the unnatural wealth she represented. He led her first to the wood from which she had seen him emerge.

“I will show you this first,” he explained. “Keep your eyes on the ground until I tell you to raise them.”

Odd as this was, she obeyed, and her lowered glance showed her that she was being guided along a narrow path between trees. The light was mellow golden-green, and birds were singing in the boughs above her. In a few minutes he stopped.

“Now look up,” he said.

She uttered an exclamation when she did so. She was in a fairy dell thick with ferns, and at beautiful distances from each other incredibly splendid oaks spread and almost trailed their lovely giant branches. The glow shining through and between them, the shadows beneath them, their great boles and moss-covered roots, and the stately, mellow distances revealed under their branches, the ancient wildness and richness, which meant, after all, centuries of cultivation, made a picture in this exact, perfect moment of ripening afternoon sun of an almost unbelievable beauty.

“There is nothing lovelier,” he said in a low voice, “in all England.”

Bettina turned to look at him, because his tone was a curious one for a man like himself. He was standing resting on his gun and taking in the loveliness with a strange look in his rugged face.

“You—you love it!” she said.

“Yes,” but with a suggestion of stubborn reluctance in the admission.

She was rather moved.

“Have you been keeper here long?” she asked.

“No—only a few years. But I have known the place all my life.”

“Does Lord Mount Dunstan love it?”

“In his way—yes.”

He was plainly not disposed to talk of his master. He was perhaps not on particularly good terms with him. He led her away and volunteered no further information. He was, upon the whole, uncommunicative. He did not once refer to the circumstance of their having met before. It was plain that he had no intention of presuming upon the fact that he, as a second-class passenger on a ship, had once been forced by accident across the barriers between himself and the saloon deck. He was stubbornly resolved to keep his place; so stubbornly that Bettina felt that to broach the subject herself would verge upon offence.

But the golden ways through which he led her made the afternoon one she knew she should never forget. They wandered through moss walks and alleys, through tangled shrubberies bursting into bloom, beneath avenues of blossoming horse-chestnuts and scented limes, between thickets of budding red and white may, and jungles of neglected rhododendrons; through sunken gardens and walled ones, past terraces with broken balustrades of stone, and fallen Floras and Dianas, past moss-grown fountains splashing in lovely corners. Arches, overgrown with yet unblooming roses, crumbled in their time stained beauty. Stillness brooded over it all, and they met no one. They scarcely broke the silence themselves. The man led the way as one who knew it by heart, and Bettina followed, not caring for speech herself, because the stillness seemed to add a spell of enchantment. What could one say, to a stranger, of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin and decay.

“But, oh!” she murmured once, standing still, with in-drawn breath, “if it were mine!—if it were mine!” And she said the thing forgetting that her guide was a living creature and stood near.

Afterwards her memories of it all seemed to her like the memories of a dream. The lack of speech between herself and the man who led her, his often averted face, her own sense of the desertedness of each beauteous spot she passed through, the mossy paths which gave back no sound of footfalls as they walked, suggested, one and all, unreality. When at last they passed through a door half hidden in an ivied wall, and crossing a grassed bowling green, mounted a short flight of broken steps which led them to a point through which they saw the house through a break in the trees, this last was the final touch of all. It was a great place, stately in its masses of grey stone to which thick ivy clung. To Bettina it seemed that a hundred windows stared at her with closed, blind eyes. All were shuttered but two or three on the lower floors. Not one showed signs of life. The silent stone thing stood sightless among all of which it was dead master—rolling acres, great trees, lost gardens and deserted groves.

“Oh!” she sighed, “Oh!”

Her companion stood still and leaned upon his gun again, looking as he had looked before.

“Some of it,” he said, “was here before the Conquest. It belonged to Mount Dunstans then.”

“And only one of them is left,” she cried, “and it is like this!”

“They have been a bad lot, the last hundred years,” was the surly liberty of speech he took, “a bad lot.”

It was not his place to speak in such manner of those of his master’s house, and it was not the part of Miss Vanderpoel to encourage him by response. She remained silent, standing perhaps a trifle more lightly erect as she gazed at the rows of blind windows in silence.

Neither of them uttered a word for some time, but at length Bettina roused herself. She had a six-mile walk before her and must go.

“I am very much obliged to you,” she began, and then paused a second. A curious hesitance came upon her, though she knew that under ordinary circumstances such hesitation would have been totally out of place. She had occupied the man’s time for an hour or more, he was of the working class, and one must not be guilty of the error of imagining that a man who has work to do can justly spend his time in one’s service for the mere pleasure of it. She knew what custom demanded. Why should she hesitate before this man, with his not too courteous, surly face. She felt slightly irritated by her own unpractical embarrassment as she put her hand into the small, latched bag at her belt.

“I am very much obliged, keeper,” she said. “You have given me a great deal of your time. You know the place so well that it has been a pleasure to be taken about by you. I have never seen anything so beautiful—and so sad. Thank you —thank you.” And she put a goldpiece in his palm.

His fingers closed over it quietly. Why it was to her great relief she did not know—because something in the simple act annoyed her, even while she congratulated herself that her hesitance had been absurd. The next moment she wondered if it could be possible that he had expected a larger fee. He opened his hand and looked at the money with a grim steadiness.

“Thank you, miss,” he said, and touched his cap in the proper manner.

He did not look gracious or grateful, but he began to put it in a small pocket in the breast of his worn corduroy shooting jacket. Suddenly he stopped, as if with abrupt resolve. He handed the coin back without any change of his glum look.

“Hang it all,” he said, “I can’t take this, you know. I suppose I ought to have told you. It would have been less awkward for us both. I am that unfortunate beggar, Mount Dunstan, myself.”

A pause was inevitable. It was a rather long one. After it, Betty took back her half-sovereign and returned it to her bag, but she pleased a certain perversity in him by looking more annoyed than confused.

“Yes,” she said. “You ought to have told me, Lord Mount Dunstan.”

He slightly shrugged his big shoulders.

“Why shouldn’t you take me for a keeper? You crossed the Atlantic with a fourth-rate looking fellow separated from you by barriers of wood and iron. You came upon him tramping over a nobleman’s estate in shabby corduroys and gaiters, with a gun over his shoulder and a scowl on his ugly face. Why should you leap to the conclusion that he is the belted Earl himself? There is no cause for embarrassment.”

“I am not embarrassed,” said Bettina.

“That is what I like,” gruffly.

“I am pleased,” in her mellowest velvet voice, “that you like it.”

Their eyes met with a singular directness of gaze. Between them a spark passed which was not afterwards to be extinguished, though neither of them knew the moment of its kindling, and Mount Dunstan slightly frowned.

“I beg pardon,” he said. “You are quite right. It had a deucedly patronising sound.”

As he stood before her Betty was given her opportunity to see him as she had not seen him before, to confront the sum total of his physique. His red-brown eyes looked out from rather fine heavy brows, his features were strong and clear, though ruggedly cut, his build showed weight of bone, not of flesh, and his limbs were big and long. He would have wielded a battle-axe with power in centuries in which men hewed their way with them. Also it occurred to her he would have looked well in a coat of mail. He did not look ill in his corduroys and gaiters.

“I am a self-absorbed beggar,” he went on. “I had been slouching about the place, almost driven mad by my thoughts, and when I saw you took me for a servant my fancy was for letting the thing go on. If I had been a rich man instead of a pauper I would have kept your half-sovereign.”

“I should not have enjoyed that when I found out the truth,” said Miss Vanderpoel

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. But I should not have cared.”

He was looking at her straightly and summing her up as she had summed him up. A man and young, he did not miss a line or a tint of her chin or cheek, shoulder, or brow, or dense, lifted hair. He had already, even in his guise of keeper, noticed one thing, which was that while at times her eyes were the blue of steel, sometimes they melted to the colour of bluebells under water. They had been of this last hue when she had stood in the sunken garden, forgetting him and crying low:

“Oh, if it were mine! If it were mine!”

He did not like American women with millions, but while he would not have said that he liked her, he did not wish her yet to move away. And she, too, did not wish, just yet, to move away. There was something dramatic and absorbing in the situation. She looked over the softly stirring grass and saw the sunshine was deepening its gold and the shadows were growing long. It was not a habit of hers to ask questions, but she asked one.

“Did you not like America?” was what she said.

“Hated it! Hated it! I went there lured by a belief that a man like myself, with muscle and will, even without experience, could make a fortune out of small capital on a sheep ranch. Wind and weather and disease played the devil with me. I lost the little I had and came back to begin over again— on nothing—here!” And he waved his hand over the park with its sward and coppice and bracken and the deer cropping in the late afternoon gold.

“To begin what again?” said Betty. It was an extraordinary enough thing, seen in the light of conventions, that they should stand and talk like this. But the spark had kindled between eye and eye, and because of it they suddenly had forgotten that they were strangers.

“You are an American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it would to others. To begin to build up again, in one man’s life, what has taken centuries to grow—and fall into this.”

“It would be a splendid thing to do,” she said slowly, and as she said it her eyes took on their colour of bluebells, because what she had seen had moved her. She had not looked at him, but at the cropping deer as she spoke, but at her next sentence she turned to him again.

“Where should you begin?” she asked, and in saying it thought of Stornham.

He laughed shortly.

“That is American enough,” he said. “Your people have not finished their beginnings yet and live in the spirit of them.

I tell you of a wild fancy, and you accept it as a possibility and turn on me with, `Where should you begin?’ “

“That is one way of beginning,” said Bettina. “In fact, it is the only way.”

He did not tell her that he liked that, but he knew that he did like it and that her mere words touched him like a spur. It was, of course, her lifelong breathing of the atmosphere of millions which made for this fashion of moving at once in the direction of obstacles presenting to the rest of the world barriers seemingly insurmountable. And yet there was something else in it, some quality of nature which did not alone suggest the omnipotence of wealth, but another thing which might be even stronger and therefore carried conviction. He who had raged and clenched his hands in the face of his knowledge of the aspect his dream would have presented if he had revealed it to the ordinary practical mind, felt that a point of view like this was good for him. There was in it stimulus for a fleeting moment at least.

“That is a good idea,” he answered. “Where should you begin?”

She replied quite seriously, though he could have imagined some girls rather simpering over the question as a casual joke.

“One would begin at the fences,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”

“That is practical.”

“That is where I shall begin at Stornham,” reflectively.

“You are going to begin at Stornham?”

“How could one help it? It is not as large or as splendid as this has been, but it is like it in a way. And it will belong to my sister’s son. No, I could not help it.”

“I suppose you could not.” There was a hint of wholly unconscious resentment in his tone. He was thinking that the effect produced by their boundless wealth was to make these people feel as a race of giants might—even their women unknowingly revealed it.

“No, I could not,” was her reply. “I suppose I am on the whole a sort of commercial working person. I have no doubt it is commercial, that instinct which makes one resent seeing things lose their value.”

“Shall you begin it for that reason?”

“Partly for that one—partly for another.” She held out her hand to him. “Look at the length of the shadows. I must go. Thank you, Lord Mount Dunstan, for showing me the place, and thank you for undeceiving me.”

He held the side gate open for her and lifted his cap as she passed through. He admitted to himself, with some reluctance, that he was not content that she should go even yet, but, of course, she must go. There passed through his mind a remote wonder why he had suddenly unbosomed himself to her in a way so extraordinarily unlike himself. It was, he thought next, because as he had taken her about from one place to another he had known that she had seen in things what he had seen in them so long—the melancholy loneliness, the significance of it, the lost hopes that lay behind it, the touching pain of the stateliness wrecked. She had shown it in the way in which she tenderly looked from side to side, in the very lightness of her footfall, in the bluebell softening of her eyes. Oh, yes, she had understood and cared, American as she was! She had felt it all, even with her hideous background of Fifth Avenue behind her.

When he had spoken it had been in involuntary response to an emotion in herself.

So he stood, thinking, as he for some time watched her walking up the sunset-glowing road.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT

Betty Vanderpoel’s walk back to Stornham did not, long though it was, give her time to follow to its end the thread of her thoughts. Mentally she walked again with her uncommunicative guide, through woodpaths and gardens, and stood gazing at the great blind-faced house. She had not given the man more than an occasional glance until he had told her his name. She had been too much absorbed, too much moved, by what she had been seeing. She wondered, if she had been more aware of him, whether his face would have revealed a great deal. She believed it would not. He had made himself outwardly stolid. But the thing must have been bitter. To him the whole story of the splendid past was familiar even if through his own life he had looked on only at gradual decay. There must be stories enough of men and women who had lived in the place, of what they had done, of how they had loved, of what they had counted for in their country’s wars and peacemakings, great functions and law-building. To be able to look back through centuries and know of one’s blood that sometimes it had been shed in the doing of great deeds, must be a thing to remember. To realise that the courage and honour had been lost in ignoble modern vices, which no sense of dignity and reverence for race and name had restrained— must be bitter—bitter! And in the role of a servant to lead a stranger about among the ruins of what had been—that must have been bitter, too. For a moment Betty felt the bitterness of it herself and her red mouth took upon itself a grim line. The worst of it for him was that he was not of that strain of his race who had been the “bad lot.” The “bad lot” had been the weak lot, the vicious, the self-degrading. Scandals which had shut men out from their class and kind were usually of an ugly type. This man had a strong jaw, a powerful, healthy body, and clean, though perhaps hard, eyes. The First Man of them, who hewed his way to the front, who stood fierce in the face of things, who won the first lands and laid the first stones, might have been like him in build and look.

“It’s a disgusting thing,” she said to herself, “to think of the corrupt weaklings the strong ones dwindled down to. I hate them. So does he.”

There had been many such of late years, she knew. She had seen them in Paris, in Rome, even in New York. Things with thin or over-thick bodies and receding chins and foreheads; things haunting places of amusement and finding inordinate entertainment in strange jokes and horseplay. She herself had hot blood and a fierce strength of rebellion, and she was wondering how, if the father and elder brother had been the “bad lot,” he had managed to stand still, looking on, and keeping his hands off them.

The last gold of the sun was mellowing the grey stone of the terrace and enriching the green of the weeds thrusting themselves into life between the uneven flags when she reached Stornham, and passing through the house found Lady Anstruthers sitting there. In sustenance of her effort to keep up appearances, she had put on a weird little muslin dress and had elaborated the dressing of her thin hair. It was no longer dragged back straight from her face, and she looked a trifle less abject, even a shade prettier. Bettina sat upon the edge of the balustrade and touched the hair with light fingers, ruffling it a little becomingly.

“If you had worn it like this yesterday,” she said, “I should have known you.”

“Should you, Betty? I never look into a mirror if I can help it, but when I do I never know myself. The thing that stares back at me with its pale eyes is not Rosy. But, of course, everyone grows old.”

“Not now! People are just discovering how to grow young instead.”

Lady Anstruthers looked into the clear courage of her laughing eyes.

“Somehow,” she said, “you say strange things in such a way that one feels as if they must be true, however—however unlike anything else they are.”

“They are not as new as they seem,” said Betty. “Ancient philosophers said things like them centuries ago, but people did not believe them. We are just beginning to drag them out of the dust and furbish them up and pretend they are ours, just as people rub up and adorn themselves with jewels dug out of excavations.”

“In America people think so many new things,” said poor little Lady Anstruthers with yearning humbleness.

“The whole civilised world is thinking what you call new things,” said Betty. “The old ones won’t do. They have been tried, and though they have helped us to the place we have reached, they cannot help us any farther. We must begin again.”

“It is such a long time since I began,” said Rosy, “such a long time.”

“Then there must be another beginning for you, too. The hour has struck.”

Lady Anstruthers rose with as involuntary a movement as if a strong hand had drawn her to her feet. She stood facing Betty, a pathetic little figure in her washed-out muslin frock and with her washed-out face and eyes and being, though on her faded cheeks a flush was rising.

“Oh, Betty!” she said, “I don’t know what there is about you, but there is something which makes one feel as if you believed everything and could do everything, and as if one believes YOU. Whatever you were to say, you would make it seem TRUE. If you said the wildest thing in the world I should BELIEVE you.”

Betty got up, too, and there was an extraordinary steadiness in her eyes.

“You may,” she answered. “I shall never say one thing to you which is not a truth, not one single thing.”

“I believe that,” said Rosy Anstruthers, with a quivering mouth. “I do believe it so.”

“I walked to Mount Dunstan,” Betty said later.

“Really?” said Rosy. “There and back?”

“Yes, and all round the park and the gardens.”

Rosy looked rather uncertain.

“Weren’t you a little afraid of meeting someone?”

“I did meet someone. At first I took him for a gamekeeper. But he turned out to be Lord Mount Dunstan.”

Lady Anstruthers gasped.

“What did he do?” she exclaimed. “Did he look angry at seeing a stranger? They say he is so ill-tempered and rude.”

“I should feel ill-tempered if I were in his place,” said Betty. “He has enough to rouse his evil passions and make him savage. What a fate for a man with any sense and decency of feeling! What fools and criminals the last generation of his house must have produced! I wonder how such things evolve themselves. But he is different—different. One can see it. If he had a chance—just half a chance—he would build it all up again. And I don’t mean merely the place, but all that one means when one says `his house.’ “

“He would need a great deal of money,” sighed Lady Anstruthers.

Betty nodded slowly as she looked out, reflecting, into the park.

“Yes, it would require money,” was her admission.

“And he has none,” Lady Anstruthers added. “None whatever.”

“He will get some,” said Betty, still reflecting. “He will make it, or dig it up, or someone will leave it to him. There is a great deal of money in the world, and when a strong creature ought to have some of it he gets it.”

“Oh, Betty!” said Rosy. “Oh, Betty! “

“Watch that man,” said Betty; “you will see. It will come.”

Lady Anstruthers’ mind, working at no time on complex lines, presented her with a simple modern solution.

“Perhaps he will marry an American,” she said, and saying it, sighed again.

“He will not do it on purpose.” Bettina answered slowly and with such an air of absence of mind that Rosy laughed a little.

“Will he do it accidentally, or against his will?” she said.

Betty herself smiled.

“Perhaps he will,” she said. “There are Englishmen who rather dislike Americans. I think he is one of them.”

It apparently became necessary for Lady Anstruthers, a moment later, to lean upon the stone balustrade and pick off a young leaf or so, for no reason whatever, unless that in doing so she averted her look from her sister as she made her next remark.

“Are you—when are you going to write to father and mother?”

“I have written,” with unembarrassed evenness of tone. “Mother will be counting the days.”

“Mother!” Rosy breathed, with a soft little gasp. “Mother!” and turned her face farther away. “What did you tell her?”

Betty moved over to her and stood close at her side. The power of her personality enveloped the tremulous creature as if it had been a sense of warmth.

“I told her how beautiful the place was, and how Ughtred adored you—and how you loved us all, and longed to see New York again.”

The relief in the poor little face was so immense that Betty’s heart shook before it. Lady Anstruthers looked up at her with adoring eyes.

“I might have known,” she said; “I might have known that—that you would only say the right thing. You couldn’t say the wrong thing, Betty.”

Betty bent over her and spoke almost yearningly.

“Whatever happens,” she said, “we will take care that mother is not hurt. She’s too kind—she’s too good—she’s too tender.”

“That is what I have remembered,” said Lady Anstruthers brokenly. “She used to hold me on her lap when I was quite grown up. Oh! her soft, warm arms—her warm shoulder! I have so wanted her.”

“She has wanted you,” Betty answered. “She thinks of you just as she did when she held you on her lap.”

“But if she saw me now—looking like this! If she saw me! Sometimes I have even been glad to think she never would.”

“She will.” Betty’s tone was cool and clear. “But before she does I shall have made you look like yourself.”

Lady Anstruthers’ thin hand closed on her plucked leaves convulsively, and then opening let them drop upon the stone of the terrace.

“We shall never see each other. It wouldn’t be possible,” she said. “And there is no magic in the world now, Betty. You can’t bring back–-“

“Yes, you can,” said Bettina. “And what used to be called magic is only the controlled working of the law and order of things in these days. We must talk it all over.”

Lady Anstruthers became a little pale.

“What?” she asked, low and nervously, and Betty saw her glance sideways at the windows of the room which opened on to the terrace.

Betty took her hand and drew her down into a chair. She sat near her and looked her straight in the face.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said. “I tell you there is no need to be frightened. We are not living in the Middle Ages. There is a policeman even in Stornham village, and we are within four hours of London, where there are thousands.”

Lady Anstruthers tried to laugh, but did not succeed very well, and her forehead flushed.

“I don’t quite know why I seem so nervous,” she said. “It’s very silly of me.”

She was still timid enough to cling to some rag of pretence, but Betty knew that it would fall away. She did the wisest possible thing, which was to make an apparently impersonal remark.

“I want you to go over the place with me and show me everything. Walls and fences and greenhouses and outbuildings must not be allowed to crumble away.”

“What?” cried Rosy. “Have you seen all that already?” She actually stared at her. “How practical and—and American!”

“To see that a wall has fallen when you find yourself obliged to walk round a pile of grass-grown brickwork?” said Betty.

Lady Anstruthers still softly stared.

“What—what are you thinking of?” she asked.

“Thinking that it is all too beautiful–-” Betty’s look swept the loveliness spread about her, “too beautiful and too valuable to be allowed to lose its value and its beauty.” She turned her eyes back to Rosy and the deep dimple near her mouth showed itself delightfully. “It is a throwing away of capital,” she added.

“Oh!” cried Lady Anstruthers, “how clever you are! And you look so different, Betty.”

“Do I look stupid?” the dimple deepening. “I must try to alter that.”

“Don’t try to alter your looks,” said Rosy. “It is your looks that make you so—so wonderful. But usually women— girls–-” Rosy paused.

“Oh, I have been trained,” laughed Betty. “I am the spoiled daughter of a business man of genius. His business is an art and a science. I have had advantages. He has let me hear him talk. I even know some trifling things about stocks. Not enough to do me vital injury—but something. What I know best of all,”—her laugh ended and her eyes changed their look,—”is that it is a blunder to think that beauty is not capital—that happiness is not—and that both are not the greatest assets in the scheme. This,” with a wave of her hand, taking in all they saw, “is beauty, and it ought to be happiness, and it must be taken care of. It is your home and Ughtred’s–-“

“It is Nigel’s,” put in Rosy.

“It is entailed, isn’t it?” turning quickly. “He cannot sell it?”

“If he could we should not be sitting here,” ruefully.

“Then he cannot object to its being rescued from ruin.”

“He will object to—to money being spent on things he does not care for.” Lady Anstruthers’ voice lowered itself, as it always did when she spoke of her husband, and she indulged in the involuntary hasty glance about her.

“I am going to my room to take off my hat,” Betty said. “Will you come with me?”

She went into the house, talking quietly of ordinary things, and in this way they mounted the stairway together and passed along the gallery which led to her room. When they entered it she closed the door, locked it, and, taking off her hat, laid it aside. After doing which she sat.

“No one can hear and no one can come in,” she said. “And if they could, you are afraid of things you need not be afraid of now. Tell me what happened when you were so ill after Ughtred was born.”

“You guessed that it happened then,” gasped Lady Anstruthers.

“It was a good time to make anything happen,” replied Bettina. “You were prostrated, you were a child, and felt yourself cast off hopelessly from the people who loved you.”

“Forever! Forever!” Lady Anstruthers’ voice was a sharp little moan. “That was what I felt—that nothing could ever help me. I dared not write things. He told me he would not have it—that he would stop any hysterical complaints—that his mother could testify that he behaved perfectly to me. She was the only person in the room with us when— when–-“

“When?” said Betty.

Lady Anstruthers shuddered. She leaned forward and caught Betty’s hand between her own shaking ones.

“He struck me! He struck me! He said it never happened— but it did—it did! Betty, it did! That was the one thing that came back to me clearest. He said that I was in delirious hysterics, and that I had struggled with his mother and himself, because they tried to keep me quiet, and prevent the servants hearing. One awful day he brought Lady Anstruthers into the room, and they stood over me, as I lay in bed, and she fixed her eyes on me and said that she—being an Englishwoman, and a person whose word would be believed, could tell people the truth—my father and mother, if necessary, that my spoiled, hysterical American tempers had created unhappiness for me—merely because I was bored by life in the country and wanted excitement. I tried to answer, but they would not let me, and when I began to shake all over, they said that I was throwing myself into hysterics again. And they told the doctor so, and he believed it.”

The possibilities of the situation were plainly to be seen. Fate, in the form of temperament itself, had been against her. It was clear enough to Betty as she patted and stroked the thin hands. “I understand. Tell me the rest,” she said.

Lady Anstruthers’ head dropped.

“When I was loneliest, and dying of homesickness, and so weak that I could not speak without sobbing, he came to me—it was one morning after I had been lying awake all night—and he began to seem kinder. He had not been near me for two days, and I had thought I was going to be left to die alone—and mother would never know. He said he had been reflecting and that he was afraid that we had misunderstood each other—because we belonged to different countries, and had been brought up in different ways–-” she paused.

“And that if you understood his position and considered it, you might both be quite happy,” Betty gave in quiet termination.

Lady Anstruthers started.

“Oh, you know it all!” she exclaimed

“Only because I have heard it before. It is an old trick. And because he seemed kind and relenting, you tried to understand—and signed something.”

“I WANTED to understand. I WANTED to believe. What did it matter which of us had the money, if we liked each other and were happy? He told me things about the estate, and about the enormous cost of it, and his bad luck, and debts he could not help. And I said that I would do anything if—if we could only be like mother and father. And he kissed me and I signed the paper.”

“And then?”

“He went to London the next day, and then to Paris. He said he was obliged to go on business. He was away a month. And after a week had passed, Lady Anstruthers began to be restless and angry, and once she flew into a rage, and told me I was a fool, and that if I had been an Englishwoman, I should have had some decent control over my husband, because he would have respected me. In time I found out what I had done. It did not take long.”

“The paper you signed,” said Betty, “gave him control over your money?”

A forlorn nod was the answer.

“And since then he has done as he chose, and he has not chosen to care for Stornham. And once he made you write to father, to ask for more money?”

“I did it once. I never would do it again. He has tried to make me. He always says it is to save Stornham for Ughtred.”

“Nothing can take Stornham from Ughtred. It may come to him a ruin, but it will come to him.”

“He says there are legal points I cannot understand. And he says he is spending money on it.”

“Where?”

“He—doesn’t go into that. If I were to ask questions, he would make me know that I had better stop. He says I know nothing about things. And he is right. He has never allowed me to know and—and I am not like you, Betty.”

“When you signed the paper, you did not realise that you were doing something you could never undo and that you would be forced to submit to the consequences?”

“I—I didn’t realise anything but that it would kill me to live as I had been living—feeling as if they hated me. And I was so glad and thankful that he seemed kinder. It was as if I had been on the rack, and he turned the screws back, and I was ready to do anything—anything—if I might be taken off. Oh, Betty! you know, don’t you, that—that if he would only have been a little kind—just a little—I would have obeyed him always, and given him everything.”

Betty sat and looked at her, with deeply pondering eyes. She was confronting the fact that it seemed possible that one must build a new soul for her as well as a new body. In these days of science and growing sanity of thought, one did not stand helpless before the problem of physical rebuilding, and—and perhaps, if one could pour life into a creature, the soul of it would respond, and wake again, and grow.

“You do not know where he is?” she said aloud. “You absolutely do not know?”

“I never know exactly,” Lady Anstruthers answered. “He was here for a few days the week before you came. He said he was going abroad. He might appear to-morrow, I might not hear of him for six months. I can’t help hoping now that it will be the six months.”

“Why particularly now?” inquired Betty.

Lady Anstruthers flushed and looked shy and awkward.

“Because of—you. I don’t know what he would say. I don’t know what he would do.”

“To me?” said Betty.

“It would be sure to be something unreasonable and wicked,” said Lady Anstruthers. “It would, Betty.”

“I wonder what it would be?” Betty said musingly.

“He has told lies for years to keep you all from me. If he came now, he would know that he had been found out. He would say that I had told you things. He would be furious because you have seen what there is to see. He would know that you could not help but realise that the money he made me ask for had not been spent on the estate. He,— Betty, he would try to force you to go away.”

“I wonder what he would do?” Betty said again musingly. She felt interested, not afraid.

“It would be something cunning,” Rosy protested. “It would be something no one could expect. He might be so rude that you could not remain in the room with him, or he might be quite polite, and pretend he was rather glad to see you. If he was only frightfully rude we should be safer, because that would not be an unexpected thing, but if he was polite, it would be because he was arranging something hideous, which you could not defend yourself against.”

“Can you tell me,” said Betty quite slowly, because, as she looked down at the carpet, she was thinking very hard, “the kind of unexpected thing he has done to you?” Lifting her eyes, she saw that a troubled flush was creeping over Lady Anstruthers’ face.

“There—have been—so many queer things,” she faltered. Then Betty knew there was some special thing she was afraid to talk about, and that if she desired to obtain illuminating information it would be well to go into the matter.

“Try,” she said, “to remember some particular incident.”

Lady Anstruthers looked nervous.

“Rosy,” in the level voice, “there has been a particular incident—and I would rather hear of it from you than from him.

Rosy’s lap held little shaking hands.

“He has held it over me for years,” she said breathlessly. “He said he would write about it to father and mother. He says he could use it against me as evidence in—in the divorce court. He says that divorce courts in America are for women, but in England they are for men, and—he could defend himself against me.”

The incongruity of the picture of the small, faded creature arraigned in a divorce court on charges of misbehaviour would have made Betty smile if she had been in smiling mood.

“What did he accuse you of?”

“That was the—the unexpected thing,” miserably.

Betty took the unsteady hands firmly in her own.

“Don’t be afraid to tell me,” she said. “He knew you so well that he understood what would terrify you the most. I know you so well that I understand how he does it. Did he do this unexpected thing just before you wrote to father for the money?” As she quite suddenly presented the question, Rosy exclaimed aloud.

“How did you know?” she said. “You—you are like a lawyer. How could you know?”

How simple she was! How obviously an easy prey! She had been unconsciously giving evidence with every word.

“I have been thinking him over,” Betty said. “He interests me. I have begun to guess that he always wants something when he professes that he has a grievance.”

Then with drooping head, Rosy told the story.

“Yes, it happened before he made me write to father for so much money. The vicar was ill and was obliged to go away for six months. The clergyman who came to take his place was a young man. He was kind and gentle, and wanted to help people. His mother was with him and she was like him. They loved each other, and they were quite poor. His name was Ffolliott. I liked to hear him preach. He said things that comforted me. Nigel found out that he comforted me, and—when he called here, he was more polite to him than he had ever been to Mr. Brent. He seemed almost as if he liked him. He actually asked him to dinner two or three times. After dinner, he would go out of the room and leave us together. Oh, Betty!” clinging to her hands, “I was so wretched then, that sometimes I thought I was going out of my mind. I think I looked wild. I used to kneel down and try to pray, and I could not.”

“Yes, yes,” said Betty.

“I used to feel that if I could only have one friend, just one, I could bear it better. Once I said something like that to Nigel. He only shrugged his shoulders and sneered when I said it. But afterwards I knew he had remembered. One evening, when he had asked Mr. Ffolliott to dinner, he led him to talk about religion. Oh, Betty! It made my blood turn cold when he began. I knew he was doing it for some wicked reason. I knew the look in his eyes and the awful, agreeable smile on his mouth. When he said at last, `If you could help my poor wife to find comfort in such things,’ I began to see. I could not explain to anyone how he did it, but with just a sentence, dropped here and there, he seemed to tell the whole story of a silly, selfish, American girl, thwarted in her vulgar little ambitions, and posing as a martyr, because she could not have her own way in everything. He said once, quite casually, `I’m afraid American women are rather spoiled.’ And then he said, in the same tolerant way— `A poor man is a disappointment to an American girl. America does not believe in rank combined with lack of fortune.’ I dared not defend myself. I am not clever enough to think of the right things to say. He meant Mr. Ffolliott to understand that I had married him because I thought he was grand and rich, and that I was a disappointed little spiteful shrew. I tried to act as if he was not hurting me, but my hands trembled, and a lump kept rising in my throat. When we returned to the drawing-room, and at last he left us together, I was praying and praying that I might be able to keep from breaking down.

She stopped and swallowed hard. Betty held her hands firmly until she went on.

“For a few minutes, I sat still, and tried to think of some new subject—something about the church or the village. But I could not begin to speak because of the lump in my throat. And then, suddenly, but quietly, Mr. Ffolliott got up. And though I dared not lift my eyes, I knew he was standing before the fire, quite near me. And, oh! what do you think he said, as low and gently as if his voice was a woman’s. I did not know that people ever said such things now, or even thought them. But never, never shall I forget that strange minute. He said just this:

” `God will help you. He will. He will.’

“As if it was true, Betty! As if there was a God—and— He had not forgotten me. I did not know what I was doing, but I put out my hand and caught at his sleeve, and when I looked up into his face, I saw in his kind, good eyes, that he knew—that somehow—God knows how—he understood and that I need not utter a word to explain to him that he had been listening to lies.”

“Did you talk to him?” Betty asked quietly.

“He talked to me. We did not even speak of Nigel. He talked to me as I had never heard anyone talk before. Somehow he filled the room with something real, which was hope and comfort and like warmth, which kept my soul from shivering. The tears poured from my eyes at first, but the lump in my throat went away, and when Nigel came back I actually did not feel frightened, though he looked at me and sneered quietly.”

“Did he say anything afterwards?”

“He laughed a little cold laugh and said, `I see you have been seeking the consolation of religion. Neurotic women like confessors. I do not object to your confessing, if you confess your own backslidings and not mine.’ “

“That was the beginning,” said Betty speculatively. “The unexpected thing was the end. Tell me the rest?”

“No one could have dreamed of it,” Rosy broke forth. “For weeks he was almost like other people. He stayed at Stornham and spent his days in shooting. He professed that he was rather enjoying himself in a dull way. He encouraged me to go to the vicarage, he invited the Ffolliotts here. He said Mrs. Ffolliott was a gentlewoman and good for me. He said it was proper that I should interest myself in parish work. Once or twice he even brought some little message to me from Mr. Ffolliott.”

It was a pitiably simple story. Betty saw, through its relation, the unconsciousness of the easily allured victim, the adroit leading on from step to step, the ordinary, natural, seeming method which arranged opportunities. The two had been thrown together at the Court, at the vicarage, the church and in the village, and the hawk had looked on and bided his time. For the first time in her years of exile, Rosy had begun to feel that she might be allowed a friend—though she lived in secret tremor lest the normal liberty permitted her should suddenly be snatched away.

“We never talked of Nigel,” she said, twisting her hands. “But he made me begin to live again. He talked to me of Something that watched and would not leave me—would never leave me. I was learning to believe it. Sometimes when I walked through the wood to the village, I used to stop among the trees and look up at the bits of sky between the branches, and listen to the sound in the leaves—the sound that never stops—and it seemed as if it was saying something to me. And I would clasp my hands and whisper, `Yes, yes,’ `I will,’ `I will.’ I used to see Nigel looking at me at table with a queer smile in his eyes and once he said to me—`You are growing young and lovely, my dear. Your colour is improving. The counsels of our friend are of a salutary nature.’

It would have made me nervous, but he said it almost good-naturedly, and I was silly enough even to wonder if it could be possible that he was pleased to see me looking less ill. It was true, Betty, that I was growing stronger. But it did not last long.”

“I was afraid not,” said Betty.

“An old woman in the lane near Bartyon Wood was ill. Mr. Ffolliott had asked me to go to see her, and I used to go. She suffered a great deal and clung to us both. He comforted her, as he comforted me. Sometimes when he was called away he would send a note to me, asking me to go to her. One day he wrote hastily, saying that she was dying, and asked if I would go with him to her cottage at once. I knew it would save time if I met him in the path which was a short cut. So I wrote a few words and gave them to the messenger. I said, `Do not come to the house. I will meet you in Bartyon Wood.’ “

Betty made a slight movement, and in her face there was a dawning of mingled amazement and incredulity. The thought which had come to her seemed—as Ughtred’s locking of the door had seemed—too wild for modern days.

Lady Anstruthers saw her expression and understood it. She made a hopeless gesture with her small, bony hand.

“Yes,” she said, “it is just like that. No one would believe it. The worst cleverness of the things he does, is that when one tells of them, they sound like lies. I have a bewildered feeling that I should not believe them myself if I had not seen them. He met the boy in the park and took the note from him. He came back to the house and up to my room, where I was dressing quickly to go to Mr. Ffolliott.”

She stopped for quite a minute, rather as if to recover breath.

“He closed the door behind him and came towards me with the note in his hand. And I saw in a second the look that always terrifies me, in his face. He had opened the note and he smoothed out the paper quietly and said, `What is this. I could not help it—I turned cold and began to shiver. I could not imagine what was coming.”

” `Is it my note to Mr. Ffolliott?’ I asked.

” `Yes, it is your note to Mr. Ffolliott,’ and he read it aloud. ` “Do not come to the house. I will meet you in Bartyon Wood.” That is a nice note for a man’s wife to have written, to be picked up and read by a stranger, if your confessor is not cautious in the matter of letters from women–-‘

“When he begins a thing in that way, you may always know that he has planned everything—that you can do nothing—I always know. I knew then, and I knew I was quite white when I answered him:

” `I wrote it in a great hurry, Mrs. Farne is worse. We are going together to her. I said I would meet him—to save time.’

“He laughed, his awful little laugh, and touched the paper.

” `I have no doubt. And I have no doubt that if other persons saw this, they would believe it. It is very likely.

” `But you believe it,’ I said. `You know it is true. No one would be so silly—so silly and wicked as to–-‘ Then I broke down and cried out. `What do you mean? What could anyone think it meant?’ I was so wild that I felt as if I was going crazy. He clenched my wrist and shook me.

” `Don’t think you can play the fool with me,’ he said. `I have been watching this thing from the first. The first time I leave you alone with the fellow, I come back to find you have been giving him an emotional scene. Do you suppose your simpering good spirits and your imbecile pink cheeks told me nothing? They told me exactly this. I have waited to come upon it, and here it is. “Do not come to the house—I will meet you in the wood.”

“That was the unexpected thing. It was no use to argue and try to explain. I knew he did not believe what he was saying, but he worked himself into a rage, he accused me of awful things, and called me awful names in a loud voice, so that he could be heard, until I was dumb and staggering. All the time, I knew there was a reason, but I could not tell then what it was. He said at last, that he was going to Mr. Ffolliott. He said, `I will meet him in the wood and I will take your note with me.’

“Betty, it was so shameful that I fell down on my knees. `Oh, don’t—don’t—do that,’ I said. `I beg of you, Nigel. He is a gentleman and a clergyman. I beg and beg of you. If you will not, I will do anything—anything.’ And at that minute I remembered how he had tried to make me write to father for money. And I cried out—catching at his coat, and holding him back. `I will write to father as you asked me. I will do anything. I can’t bear it.’ “

“That was the whole meaning of the whole thing,” said Betty with eyes ablaze. “That was the beginning, the middle and the end. What did he say?”

“He pretended to be made more angry. He said, `Don’t insult me by trying to bribe me with your vulgar money. Don’t insult me.’ But he gradually grew sulky instead of raging, and though he put the note in his pocket, he did not go to Mr. Ffolliott. And—I wrote to father.”

“I remember that,” Betty answered. “Did you ever speak to Mr. Ffolliott again?”

“He guessed—he knew—I saw it in his kind, brown eyes when he passed me without speaking, in the village. I daresay the villagers were told about the awful thing by some servant, who heard Nigel’s voice. Villagers always know what is happening. He went away a few weeks later. The day before he went, I had walked through the wood, and just outside it, I met him. He stopped for one minute—just one—he lifted his hat and said, just as he had spoken them that first night—just the same words, `God will help you. He will. He will.’ “

A strange, almost unearthly joy suddenly flashed across her face.

“It must be true,” she said. “It must be true. He has sent you, Betty. It has been a long time—it has been so long that sometimes I have forgotten his words. But you have come!”

“Yes, I have come,” Betty answered. And she bent forward and kissed her gently, as if she had been soothing a child.

There were other questions to ask. She was obliged to ask them. “The unexpected thing” had been used as an instrument for years. It was always efficacious. Over the yearningly homesick creature had hung the threat that her father and mother, those she ached and longed for, could be told the story in such a manner as would brand her as a woman with a shameful secret. How could she explain herself? There were the awful, written words. He was her husband. He was remorseless, plausible. She dared not write freely. She had no witnesses to call upon. She had discovered that he had planned with composed steadiness that misleading impressions should be given to servants and village people. When the Brents returned to the vicarage, she had observed, with terror, that for some reason they stiffened, and looked askance when the Ffolliotts were mentioned.

“I am afraid, Lady Anstruthers, that Mr. Ffolliott was a great mistake,” Mrs. Brent said once.

Lady Anstruthers had not dared to ask any questions. She had felt the awkward colour rising in her face and had known that she looked guilty. But if she had protested against the injustice of the remark, Sir Nigel would have heard of her words before the day had passed, and she shuddered to think of the result. He had by that time reached the point of referring to Ffolliott with sneering lightness, as “Your lover.”

“Do you defend your lover to me,” he had said on one occasion, when she had entered a timid protest. And her white face and wild helpless eyes had been such evidence as to the effect the word had produced, that he had seen the expediency of making a point of using it.

The blood beat in Betty Vanderpoel’s veins.

“Rosy,” she said, looking steadily in the faded face, “tell me this. Did you never think of getting away from him, of going somewhere, and trying to reach father, by cable, or letter, by some means?”

Lady Anstruthers’ weary and wrinkled little smile was a pitiably illuminating thing.

“My dear” she said, “if you are strong and beautiful and rich and well dressed, so that people care to look at you, and listen to what you say, you can do things. But who, in England, will listen to a shabby, dowdy, frightened woman, when she runs away from her husband, if he follows her and tells people she is hysterical or mad or bad? It is the shabby, dowdy woman who is in the wrong. At first, I thought of nothing else but trying to get away. And once I went to Stornham station. I walked all the way, on a hot day. And just as I was getting into a third-class carriage, Nigel marched in and caught my arm, and held me back. I fainted and when I came to myself I was in the carriage, being driven back to the Court, and he was sitting opposite to me. He said, `You fool! It would take a cleverer woman than you to carry that out.’ And I knew it was the awful truth.”

“It is not the awful truth now,” said Betty, and she rose to her feet and stood looking before her, but with a look which did not rest on chairs and tables. She remained so, standing for a few moments of dead silence.

“What a fool he was!” she said at last. “And what a villain! But a villain is always a fool.”

She bent, and taking Rosy’s face between her hands, kissed it with a kiss which seemed like a seal. “That will do,” she said. “Now I know. One must know what is in one’s hands and what is not. Then one need not waste time in talking of miserable things. One can save one’s strength for doing what can be done.”

“I believe you would always think about DOING things,” said Lady Anstruthers. “That is American, too.”

“It is a quality Americans inherited from England,” lightly; “one of the results of it is that England covers a rather large share of the map of the world. It is a practical quality. You and I might spend hours in talking to each other of what Nigel has done and what you have done, of what he has said, and of what you have said. We might give some hours, I daresay, to what the Dowager did and said. But wiser people than we are have found out that thinking of black things past is living them again, and it is like poisoning one’s blood. It is deterioration of property.”

She said the last words as if she had ended with a jest. But she knew what she was doing.

“You were tricked into giving up what was yours, to a person who could not be trusted. What has been done with it, scarcely matters. It is not yours, but Sir Nigel’s. But we are not helpless, because we have in our hands the most powerful material agent in the world.

“Come, Rosy, and let us walk over the house. We will begin with that.”

CHAPTER XVII

TOWNLINSON & SHEPPARD

During the whole course of her interesting life—and she had always found life interesting—Betty Vanderpoel decided that she had known no experience more absorbing than this morning spent in going over the long-closed and deserted portions of the neglected house. She had never seen anything like the place, or as full of suggestion. The greater part of it had simply been shut up and left to time and weather, both of which had had their effects. The fine old red roof, having lost tiles, had fallen into leaks that let in rain, which had stained and rotted walls, plaster, and woodwork; wind and storm had beaten through broken window panes and done their worst with such furniture and hangings as they found to whip and toss and leave damp and spotted with mould. They passed through corridors, and up and down short or long stairways, with stained or faded walls, and sometimes with cracked or fallen plastering and wainscotting. Here and there the oak flooring itself was uncertain. The rooms, whether large or small, all presented a like aspect of potential beauty and comfort, utterly uncared for and forlorn. There were many rooms, but none more than scantily furnished, and a number of them were stripped bare. Betty found herself wondering how long a time it had taken the belongings of the big place to dwindle and melt away into such bareness.

“There was a time, I suppose, when it was all furnished,” she said.

“All these rooms were shut up when I came here,” Rosy answered. “I suppose things worth selling have been sold. When pieces of furniture were broken in one part of the house, they were replaced by things brought from another. No one cared. Nigel hates it all. He calls it a rathole. He detests the country everywhere, but particularly this part of it. After the first year I had learned better than to speak to him of spending money on repairs.”

“A good deal of money should be spent on repairs,” reflected Betty, looking about her.

She was standing in the middle of a room whose walls were hung with the remains of what had been chintz, covered with a pattern of loose clusters of moss rosebuds. The dampness had rotted it until, in some places, it had fallen away in strips from its fastenings. A quaint, embroidered couch stood in one corner, and as Betty looked at it, a mouse crept from under the tattered valance, stared at her in alarm and suddenly darted back again, in terror of intrusion so unusual. A casement window swung open, on a broken hinge, and a strong branch of ivy, having forced its way inside, had thrown a covering of leaves over the deep ledge, and was beginning to climb the inner woodwork. Through the casement was to be seen a heavenly spread of country, whose rolling lands were clad softly in green pastures and thick-branched trees.

“This is the Rosebud Boudoir,” said Lady Anstruthers, smiling faintly. “All the rooms have names. I thought them so delightful, when I first heard them. The Damask Room— the Tapestry Room—the White Wainscot Room—My Lady’s Chamber. It almost broke my heart when I saw what they looked like.”

“It would be very interesting,” Betty commented slowly, “to make them look as they ought to look.”

A remote fear rose to the surface of the expression in Lady Anstruthers’ eyes. She could not detach herself from certain recollections of Nigel—of his opinions of her family—of his determination not to allow it to enter as a factor in either his life or hers. And Betty had come to Stornham—Betty whom he had detested as a child—and in the course of two days, she had seemed to become a new part of the atmosphere, and to make the dead despair of the place begin to stir with life. What other thing than this was happening as she spoke of making such rooms as the Rosebud Boudoir “look as they ought to look,” and said the words not as if they were part of a fantastic vision, but as if they expressed a perfectly possible thing?

Betty saw the doubt in her eyes, and in a measure, guessed at its meaning. The time to pause for argument had, however not arrived. There was too much to be investigated, too much to be seen. She swept her on her way. They wandered on through some forty rooms, more or less; they opened doors and closed them; they unbarred shutters and let the sun stream in on dust and dampness and cobwebs. The comprehension of the situation which Betty gained was as valuable as it was enlightening.