moved toward the door she said:

"You have not answered me."

"I beg your pardon," he said, with chill politeness. "I answered you
in the beginning. I wish you to leave the management of the tenants'
affairs where they properly belong--with me."

So saying, he lifted his hat, bowed, and went.

Bettina stood where he had left her, trembling with indignation from
the sense of being treated tyrannically by a person who exercised an
arbitrary power over her which she could not dispute. What had she
ever done to deserve such treatment at his hands? How dared he treat
her so?

With the new-born instinct of rectitude within her she tried to see
if there was any reasonable ground for the real dislike of her which
now seemed to be in her husband's mind. With every desire to be
honest, she could think of none except the fact that she had not
answered to his rein. He could hardly resent her not loving him, for
he had married her without asking that; and besides, what did he know
of love, as she was now beginning to comprehend it? No, it was not
that which he resented in her; it was the fact that, although she
chose to conform to him in outward things, he had never obtained the
mastery of her in the manner which, to his ideas, befitted the
relationship of Lord and Lady Hurdly. She thought of the picture of
his meek little mother and masterful-looking father.

CHAPTER X

Bettina had been left to the lonely idleness of her own reflections
but a few days when the monotony of her life was broken by one of
those sudden events which, by the vastness of their consequences,
seem not only to change the face of nature for us, and the aspect of
all the world without, but also to change ourselves, in our spirits
and minds, so that we can never be the same creatures that we were
before. She received a telegram announcing that Lord Hurdly had been
killed in the hunting-field.

Poor Bettina, with all her faults and limitations, had something of
her mother's noble nature in her, and this element of her somewhat
complicated individuality had been the part of her which had expanded
most of late. Her first feelings, therefore, were unmingled pity and
regret. She did not think of herself and of how all things would be
changed for her. Her whole thought was of him who so long had existed
in her mind as the image of pride and indomitable self-will, but who
had now become, in one moment, the object of her deepest pity. She
had scarcely