! 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. Bet