n flocks and took possession of suites of rooms,
sometimes for twenty-four hours, sometimes for six weeks.

The Worthingtons took possession of such a suite in such a hotel.
Bettina Vanderpoel's apartments faced the Embankment. From her windows
she could look out at the broad splendid, muddy Thames, slowly rolling
in its grave, stately way beneath its bridges, bearing with it heavy
lumbering barges, excited tooting little penny steamers and craft
of various shapes and sizes, the errand or burden of each meaning a
different story.

It had been to Bettina one of her pleasures of the finest epicurean
flavour to reflect that she had never had any brief and superficial
knowledge of England, as she had never been to the country at all in
those earlier years, when her knowledge of places must necessarily have
been always the incomplete one of either a schoolgirl traveller or
a schoolgirl resident, whose views were limited by the walls of
restriction built around her.

If relations of the usual ease and friendliness had existed between Lady
Anstruthers and her family, Bettina would, doubtless, have known her
sister's adopted country well. It would have been a thing so natural
as to be almost inevitable, that she would have crossed the Channel to
spend her holidays at Stornham. As matters had stood, however, the child
herself, in the days when she had been a child, had had most definite
private views on the subject of visits to England. She had made up her
young mind absolutely that she would not, if it were decently possible
to avoid it, set her foot upon English soil until she was old enough
and strong enough to carry out what had been at first her passionately
romantic plans for discovering and facing the truth of the reason for
the apparent change in Rosy. When she went to England, she would go to
Rosy. As she had grown older, having in the course of education and
travel seen most Continental countries, she had liked to think that
she had saved, put aside for less hasty consumption and more delicate
appreciation of flavours, as it were, the country she was conscious she
cared for most.

"It is England we love, we Americans," she had said to her father. "What
could be more natural? We belong to it--it belongs to us. I could never
be convinced that the old tie of blood does not count. All nationalities
have come to us since we became a nation, but most of us in the
beginning came from England. We are touching about it, too