f the physicians in attendance had
been stringent in regard to visitors, even relatives who did not fear
contagion.

"If she had been living in New York and her children had been ill I
should have been with her all the time," poor Mrs. Vanderpoel had said
with tears. "Rosy's changed awfully, somehow. Her letters don't sound a
bit like she used to be. It seems as if she just doesn't care to see her
mother and father."

Betty had frowned a good deal and thought intensely in secret. She did
not believe that Rosy was ashamed of her relations. She remembered,
however, it is true, that Clara Newell (who had been a schoolmate) had
become very super-fine and indifferent to her family after her marriage
to an aristocratic and learned German. Hers had been one of the
successful alliances, and after living a few years in Berlin she had
quite looked down upon New Yorkers, and had made herself exceedingly
unpopular during her one brief visit to her relatives. She seemed
to think her father and mother undignified and uncultivated, and she
disapproved entirely of her sisters dress and bearing. She said that
they had no distinction of manner and that all their interests were
frivolous and unenlightened.

"But Clara always was a conceited girl," thought Betty. "She was always
patronising people, and Rosy was only pretty and sweet. She always said
herself that she had no brains. But she had a heart."

After the lapse of a few years there had been no further discussion of
plans for visiting Stornham. Rosalie had become so remote as to appear
almost unreachable. She had been presented at Court, she had had three
children, the Dowager Lady Anstruthers had died. Once she had written
to her father to ask for a large sum of money, which he had sent to
her, because she seemed to want it very much. She required it to pay off
certain debts on the estate and spoke touchingly of her boy who would
inherit.

"He is a delicate boy, father," she wrote, "and I don't want the estate
to come to him burdened."

When she received the money she wrote gratefully of the generosity shown
her, but she spoke very vaguely of the prospect of their seeing each
other in the future. It was as if she felt her own remoteness even more
than they felt it themselves.

In the meantime Bettina had been taken to France and placed at school
there. The resulting experience was an enlightening one, far more
illuminating to the quick-witted American child than it would h