d the little hunchbacked baby. She was glad when
the Dowager died and when Nigel spent his time in London or on the
Continent and left her with Ughtred. When he said that he must spend her
money on the estate, she had acquiesced without comment, because that
insured his going away. She saw that no improvement or repairs were
made, but she could do nothing and was too listless to make the attempt.
She only wanted to be left alone with Ughtred, and she exhibited
willpower only in defence of her child and in her obstinacy with regard
to asking money of her father.

"She thought, somehow, that grandfather and grandmother did not care
for her any more--that they had forgotten her and only cared for you,"
Ughtred explained. "She used to talk to me about you. She said you must
be so clever and so handsome that no one could remember her. Sometimes
she cried and said she did not want any of you to see her again, because
she was only a hideous, little, thin, yellow old woman. When I was very
little she told me stories about New York and Fifth Avenue. I thought
they were not real places--I though they were places in fairyland."

Betty patted his shoulder and looked away for a moment when he said
this. In her remote and helpless loneliness, to Rosy's homesick,
yearning soul, noisy, rattling New York, Fifth Avenue with its traffic
and people, its brown-stone houses and ricketty stages, had seemed like
THAT--so splendid and bright and heart-filling, that she had painted
them in colours which could belong only to fairyland. It said so much.

The thing she had suspected as she had talked to her sister was, before
the interview ended, made curiously clear. The first obstacle in her
pathway would be the shrinking of a creature who had been so long under
dominion that the mere thought of seeing any steps taken towards her
rescue filled her with alarm. One might be prepared for her almost
praying to be let alone, because she felt that the process of her
salvation would bring about such shocks and torments as she could not
endure the facing of.

"She will have to get used to you," Ughtred kept saying. "She will have
to get used to thinking things."

"I will be careful," Bettina answered. "She shall not be troubled. I did
not come to trouble her."

CHAPTER XIII

ONE OF THE NEW YORK DRESSES

As she went down the staircase later, on her way to dinner, Miss
Vanderpoel saw on all sides signs of the extent of the nakedness of
the