might be. To do so would be like forcing a creature accustomed only to darkness, to stare at the blazing sun. To have burst upon her with the old impetuous, candid fondness would have been to frighten and shock her as if with something bordering on indecency. She could not have stood it; perhaps such fondness was so remote from her in these days that she had even ceased to be able to understand it.
“Where are your little girls?” Bettina asked, remembering that there had been notice given of the advent of two girl babies.
“They died,” Lady Anstruthers answered unemotionally. “They both died before they were a year old. There is only Ughtred.”
Betty glanced at the boy and saw a small flame of red creep up on his cheek. Instinctively she knew what it meant, and she put out her hand and lightly touched his shoulder.
“I hope you’ll like me, Ughtred,” she said.
He almost started at the sound of her voice, but when he turned his face towards her he only grew redder, and looked awkward without answering. His manner was that of a boy who was unused to the amenities of polite society, and who was only made shy by them.
Without warning, a moment or so later, Bettina stopped in the middle of the avenue, and looked up at the arching giant branches of the trees which had reached out from one side to the other, as if to clasp hands or encompass an interlacing embrace. As far as the eye reached, they did this, and the beholder stood as in a high stately pergola, with breaks of deep azure sky between. Several mellow, cawing rooks were floating solemnly beneath or above the branches, now wand then settling in some highest one or disappearing in the thick greenness.
Lady Anstruthers stopped when her sister did so, and glanced at her in vague inquiry. It was plain that she had outlived even her sense of the beauty surrounding her.
“What are you looking at, Betty?” she asked.
“At all of it,” Betty answered. “It is so wonderful.”
“She likes it,” said Ughtred, and then rather slunk a step behind his mother, as if he were ashamed of himself.
“The house is just beyond those trees,” said Lady Anstruthers.
They came in full view of it three minutes later. When she saw it, Betty uttered an exclamation and stopped again to enjoy effects.
“She likes that, too,” said Ughtred, and, although he said it sheepishly, there was imperfectly concealed beneath the awkwardness a pleasure in the fact.
“Do you?” asked Rosalie, with her small, painful smile.
Betty laughed.
“It is too picturesque, in its special way, to be quite credible,” she said.
“I thought that when I first saw it,” said Rosy.
“Don’t you think so, now?”
“Well,” was the rather uncertain reply, “as Nigel says, there’s not much good in a place that is falling to pieces.”
“Why let it fall to pieces?” Betty put it to her with impartial promptness.
“We haven’t money enough to hold it together,” resignedly.
As they climbed the low, broad, lichen-blotched steps, whose broken stone balustrades were almost hidden in clutching, untrimmed ivy, Betty felt them to be almost incredible, too. The uneven stones of the terrace the steps mounted to were lichen-blotched and broken also. Tufts of green growths had forced themselves between the flags, and added an untidy beauty. The ivy tossed in branches over the red roof and walls of the house. It had been left unclipped, until it was rather an endlessly clambering tree than a creeper. The hall they entered had the beauty of spacious form and good, old oaken panelling. There were deep window seats and an ancient high-backed settle or so, and a massive table by the fireless hearth. But there were no pictures in places where pictures had evidently once hung, and the only coverings on the stone floor were the faded remnants of a central rug and a worn tiger skin, the head almost bald and a glass eye knocked out.
Bettina took in the unpromising details without a quiver of the extravagant lashes. These, indeed, and the eyes pertaining to them, seemed rather to sweep the fine roof, and a certain minstrel’s gallery and staircase, than which nothing could have been much finer, with the look of an appreciative admirer of architectural features and old oak. She had not journeyed to Stornham Court with the intention of disturbing Rosy, or of being herself obviously disturbed. She had come to observe situations and rearrange them with that intelligence of which unconsidered emotion or exclamation form no part.
“It is the first old English house I have seen,” she said, with a sigh of pleasure. “I am so glad, Rosy—I am so glad that it is yours.”
She put a hand on each of Rosy’s thin shoulders—she felt sharply defined bones as she did so—and bent to kiss her. It was the natural affectionate expression of her feeling, but tears started to Rosy’s eyes, and the boy Ughtred, who had sat down in a window seat, turned red again, and shifted in his place.
“Oh, Betty!” was Rosy’s faint nervous exclamation, “you seem so beautiful and—so—so strange—that you frighten me.”
Betty laughed with the softest possible cheerfulness, shaking her a little.
“I shall not seem strange long,” she said, “after I have stayed with you a few weeks, if you will let me stay with you.”
“Let you! Let you!” in a sort of gasp.
Poor little Lady Anstruthers sank on to a settle and began to cry again. It was plain that she always cried when things occurred. Ughtred’s speech from his window seat testified at once to that.
