ed, and then passed on and stood before
that most beautiful of all the Lady Hurdlys who had been or who might
ever be. But this was too demoralizing to that mood of hardness that
he had but recently assumed, and so he turned his back on the
gracious image and walked away.

It was not long, however, before he found himself in Bettina's own
apartments. These he remembered well, and in the main they were
unchanged. Yet what a subtle difference he felt in them! Here on this
great gloomy bed had that poor orphan girl slept, or else lain
wakeful in the dread consciousness which must have come to her when
once she realized the nature and character of the man to whom she had
given herself in marriage. Here in this stately mirror had she seen
herself arrayed in the splendid clothes which were the poor price for
which she had sold her birthright. He stood and looked at himself in
the mirror, with an uncanny feeling that behind his own image there
was that of the beautiful Bettina, whom once he had thought to
protect forever by his love and strength and tenderness, and who now,
with only a hired servant, was alone in the great shipful of
strangers, on her way to the loneliness of that empty little village
which her mother's presence had once so adequately filled for her.

He went to the wardrobe and opened the door, hoping to find some
trace of Bettina. But no; all was orderly and void. Then he passed on
to the dressing-table and opened the drawers, one by one. In the last
there lay a small hair-pin of fine bent wire. He had an impulse to
take it, but, with a muttered imprecation on his folly, he called to
aid his recent resolution, and hastily left the room.

CHAPTER XVI

Bettina had been in her old home a week--long enough to recuperate
from her journey and begin to take up her life, such as it was to be.
She would gladly have relaxed entirely and lain in bed to be waited
on and tended by Nora, had this been possible. But she had wearied of
the physical rest, which only made her mental restlessness the
greater, and she had an impulse to reach out her empty hands so that
somehow, somewhence they might be filled.

The neighbors had called on her promptly, but she could not see them.
They reminded her too much of the mother she had lost. Mr. Spotswood
had also called, but he was a reminder of the other loss, now the
more poignant of the two. When she excused herself to him also he
wrote her a note--the conventional th