aloofness
from her family was the result of his design.

She comprehended, in her maturer years, the dislike of her childhood.
She remembered a certain look in his face which she had detested. She
had not known then that it was the look of a rather clever brute, who
was malignant, but she knew now.

"He used to hate us all," she said to herself. "He did not mean to know
us when he had taken Rosalie away, and he did not intend that she should
know us."

She had heard rumours of cases somewhat parallel, cases in which girls'
lives had become swamped in those of their husbands, and their husbands'
families. And she had also heard unpleasant details of the means
employed to reach the desired results. Annie Butterfield's husband had
forbidden her to correspond with her American relatives. He had argued
that such correspondence was disturbing to her mind, and to the domestic
duties which should be every decent woman's religion. One of the
occasions of his beating her had been in consequence of his finding her
writing to her mother a letter blotted with tears. Husbands frequently
objected to their wives' relatives, but there was a special order
of European husband who opposed violently any intimacy with American
relations on the practical ground that their views of a wife's position,
with regard to her husband, were of a revolutionary nature.

Mrs. Vanderpoel had in her possession every letter Rosalie or her
husband had ever written. Bettina asked to be allowed to read them, and
one morning seated herself in her own room before a blazing fire, with
the collection on a table at her side. She read them in order. Nigel's
began as they went on. They were all in one tone, formal, uninteresting,
and requiring no answers. There was not a suggestion of human feeling in
one of them.

"He wrote them," said Betty, "so that we could not say that he had never
written."

Rosalie's first epistles were affectionate, but timid. At the outset
she was evidently trying to conceal the fact that she was homesick.
Gradually she became briefer and more constrained. In one she said
pathetically, "I am such a bad letter writer. I always feel as if I want
to tear up what I have written, because I never say half that is in my
heart." Mrs. Vanderpoel had kissed that letter many a time. She was sure
that a mark on the paper near this particular sentence was where a tear
had fallen. Bettina was sure of this, too, and sat and looked at the
fire for s