what the news meant to her, but that night
pride and love fought in the last ditch. It seemed to Becky that with
Dalton at King's Crest the agony of the situation was intensified.

"Oh, why should I care?" she kept asking herself as she sat late by her
window. "He doesn't. And I have known him only three weeks. Why
should he count so much?"

She knew that he counted to the measure of her own constancy. "I can't
bear it," she said over and over again pitifully, as the hours passed.
"I think I shall--die."

It seemed to her that she wanted more than anything in the whole wide
world to see him for a moment--to hear the quick voice--to meet the
sparkle of his glance.

Well, why not? If she called him--he would come. She was sure of
that. He was staying away because he thought that she cared. And he
didn't want her to care. But he was not really--cruel--and if she
called him----

She wandered around the room, stopping at a window and going on,
stopping at another to stare out into the starless night. There had
been rain, and there was that haunting wet fragrance from the garden.
"I must see him," she said, and put her hand to her throat.

She went down-stairs. Everybody was in bed. There was no one to hear.
Her grandfather's room was over the library; Mandy and Calvin slept in
servants' quarters outside. To-morrow the house would be full of
ears--and it would be too late.

A faint light burned in the lower hall. The stairway swept down from a
sort of upper gallery, and all around the gallery and on the stairs and
along the lower hall were the portraits of Becky's dead and gone
ancestors.

They were really very worth-while ancestors, not as solid and
substantial perhaps as those whose portraits hung in the Meredith house
on Main Street in Nantucket, but none the less aristocratic, with a bit
of dare-devil about the men, and a hint of frivolity about the
women--with a pink coat here and a black patch there, with the sheen of
satin and the sparkle of jewels--a Cavalier crowd, with the greatest
ancestor of all in his curly wig and his sweeping plumes.

They stared at Becky as she went down-stairs, a little white figure in
her thin blue dressing-gown, her bronze hair twisted into a curly
topknot, her feet in small blue slippers.

The telephone was on a small table under the portrait of the greatest
grandfather. He had a high nose, and a fine clear complexion, and he
looked really very much alive as h