She had not expected to say it, but she had said it. Lady Anstruthers
looked at her fascinated, and then she covered her face with her hands,
huddling herself in a heap as she knelt on the rug, looking singularly
small and frail.

"Betty," she said presently, in a new, awful little voice, "I--I will
tell you something. I never thought I should dare to tell anyone alive.
I have shuddered at it myself. There have been days--awful, helpless
days, when I was sure there was no hope for me in all the world--when
deep down in my soul I understood what women felt when they MURDERED
people--crept to them in their wicked sleep and STRUCK them again--and
again--and again. Like that!" She sat up suddenly, as if she did not
know what she was doing, and uncovering her little ghastly face struck
downward three fierce times at nothingness--but as if it were not
nothingness, and as if she held something in her hand.

There was horror in it--Betty sprang at the hand and caught it.

"No! no!" she cried out. "Poor little Rosy! Darling little Rosy! No! no!
no!"

That instant Lady Anstruthers looked up at her shocked and awake. She
was Rosy again, and clung to her, holding to her dress, piteous and
panting.

"No! no!" she said. "When it came to me in the night--it was always in
the night--I used to get out of bed and pray that it might never, never
come again, and that I might be forgiven--just forgiven. It was too
horrible that I should even UNDERSTAND it so well." A woeful, wry little
smile twisted her mouth. "I was not brave enough to have done it. I
could never have DONE it, Betty; but the thought was there--it was
there! I used to think it had made a black mark on my soul."

. . . . .

The letter took long to write. It led a consecutive story up to the
point where it culminated in a situation which presented itself as no
longer to be dealt with by means at hand. Parts of the story previous
letters had related, though some of them it had not seemed absolutely
necessary to relate in detail. Now they must be made clear, and Betty
made them so.

"Because you trusted me you made me trust myself," was one of the things
she wrote. "For some time I felt that it was best to fight for my own
hand without troubling you. I hoped perhaps I might be able to lead
things to a decorous sort of issue. I saw that secretly Rosy hoped and
prayed that it might be possible. She gave up expecting happiness before
she was twenty, and mere decent pea