of "it." Lady Anstruthers looked at her with faintly smiling
eyes. She did not follow all this quite readily, but she felt pleased
and vaguely comforted.

"I know how they come here and marry," she said. "The new Duchess of
Downes is an American. She had a fortune of two million pounds."

"If she chooses to rebuild a great house and a great name," said Betty,
lifting her shoulders lightly, "why not--if it is an honest bargain? I
suppose it is part of the building of the bridge."

Little Lady Anstruthers, trying to pull up the sleeves of the gauzy
bodice slipping off her small, sharp bones, stared at her half in
wondering adoration, half in alarm.

"Betty--you--you are so handsome--and so clever and strange," she
fluttered. "Oh, Betty, stand up so that I can see how tall and handsome
you are!"

Betty did as she was told, and upon her feet she was a young woman of
long lines, and fine curves so inspiring to behold that Lady Anstruthers
clasped her hands together on her knees in an excited gesture.

"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" she cried. "You are just as wonderful as you looked
when I turned and saw you under the trees. You almost make me afraid."

"Because I am wonderful?" said Betty. "Then I will not be wonderful any
more."

"It is not because I think you wonderful, but because other people will.
Would you rebuild a great house?" hesitatingly.

The fine line of Betty's black brows drew itself slightly together.

"No," she said.

"Wouldn't you?"

"How could the man who owned it persuade me that he was in earnest if he
said he loved me? How could I persuade him that I was worth caring for
and not a mere ambitious fool? There would be too much against us."

"Against you?" repeated Lady Anstruthers.

"I don't say I am fair," said Betty. "People who are proud are often not
fair. But we should both of us have seen and known too much."

"You have seen me now," said Lady Anstruthers in her listless voice, and
at the same moment dinner was announced and she got up from the sofa, so
that, luckily, there was no time for the impersonal answer it would have
been difficult to invent at a moment's notice. As they went into the
dining-room Betty was thinking restlessly. She remembered all the
material she had collected during her education in France and Germany,
and there was added to it the fact that she HAD seen Rosy, and having
her before her eyes she felt that there was small prospect of
her contemplating the rebuilding