ty--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ill-cut, out-of-date dress, the cheap suit of the hunchbacked boy,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 ha