es.

"I did not understand it was a personal matter," she remarked. "Where do
the domestic difficulties come in?"

He stared at her a few seconds with the look she did not like, which
was less likeable at the moment, because it combined itself with other
things.

"Hang it," he muttered. "I wish I could keep my temper as you can keep
yours," and he turned on his heel and left the room.

Rosy had not spoken. She had sat with her hands in her lap, looking out
of the window. She had at first had a moment of terror. She had,
indeed, once uttered in her soul the abject cry: "Don't make him angry,
Betty--oh, don't, don't!" And suddenly it had been stilled, and she
had listened. This was because she realised that Nigel himself was
listening. That made her see what she had not dared to allow herself
to see before. These trite things were true. There were laws to protect
one. If Betty had not been dealing with mere truths, Nigel would have
stopped her. He had been supercilious, but he could not contradict her.

"Betty," she said, when her sister came to her, "you said that to show
ME things, as well as to show them to him. I knew you did, and listened
to every word. It was good for me to hear you."

"Clear-cut, unadorned facts are like bullets," said Betty. "They reach
home, if one's aim is good. The shiftiest people cannot evade them."

. . . . .

A certain thing became evident to Betty during the time which elapsed
between the arrival of the invitations and the great ball. Despite an
obvious intention to assume an amiable pose for the time being, Sir
Nigel could not conceal a not quite unexplainable antipathy to one
individual. This individual was Mount Dunstan, whom it did not seem easy
for him to leave alone. He seemed to recur to him as a subject, without
any special reason, and this somewhat puzzled Betty until she heard from
Rosalie of his intimacy with Lord Tenham, which, in a measure, explained
it. The whole truth was that "The Lout," as he had been called, had
indulged in frank speech in his rare intercourse with his brother and
his friends, and had once interfered with hot young fury in a matter in
which the pair had specially wished to avoid all interference. His open
scorn of their methods of entertaining themselves they had felt to be
disgusting impudence, which would have been deservedly punished with a
horsewhip, if the youngster had not been a big-muscled, clumsy oaf, with
a dangerous eye. Upon this foot