adoration that he could but feel
confident that they would bring him a reply in kind. When at last her
letters did come, they were so short, scant, and preoccupied that
they fell like blows upon his heart. When he thought of the
passionately loving letters that she was getting almost daily, while
he got so rarely these half-hearted and insufficient ones, his pride
became aroused, and he decided that he would imitate her to the
extent of writing more rarely, even if he could not find it in his
heart to write to her coolly, as she did to him. In this way it came
to pass that there was a distinct change in the tone of his letters
to her. As day by day, and sometimes week by week, passed without his
hearing from her, and as her letters, when they came, continued to
speak only of her mother's health and her grief about it, the young
fellow's love and pride were alike so wounded that he forced himself,
so far as his nature and feelings would allow, to imitate her
attitude to him, and to cease the expression of the vehement love
for her in which he got no response.

At last, after a longer interval than usual, he got a letter from
Bettina, which told him that her mother was dead--had, indeed, been
dead and buried almost two weeks before she had roused herself to
write to him.

In the tone of this letter there was a sort of desperate resolution
that showed that a reaction had come on, under the stress of which
she had been roused to act with energy. She announced that as she had
found it intolerable to stay where she was, she would sail for Europe
at once. She fixed the 23d of June as the day on which she had
decided to sail. In reality, however, she actually embarked from New
York just one week earlier. This was in pursuance of a certain plan
which required that she should have one week in London quite free of
Horace before he should come to claim the fulfilment of her promise
to marry him.

CHAPTER II

Bettina was in London. The ocean voyage had done her good, and the
necessary effect of change, variety, new faces, new feelings, new
thoughts, had been to take her out of herself--the self that was
nothing but a grieving and bereaved daughter--and to quicken the
pleasure-loving instincts and thirst for admiration which were as
inherently, though not as prominently, a part of her. There was still
a root of bitterness springing up within her whenever she thought of
her mother's being taken from her, and this very e