seat and limped forward. His
unprepossessing face looked as if he pulled his childishness together
with an unchildish effort.

"She means," he said, in his awkward way, "that she doesn't know how
to make you comfortable. The rooms are all so shabby--everything is so
shabby. Perhaps you won't stay when you see."

Bettina perceptibly increased the firmness of her hold on her sister's
body. It was as if she drew it nearer to her side in a kind of taking
possession. She knew that the moment had come when she might go this
far, at least, without expressing alarming things.

"You cannot show me anything that will frighten me," was the answer
she made. "I have come to stay, Rosy. We can make things right if they
require it. Why not?"

Lady Anstruthers started a little, and stared at her. She knew ten
thousand reasons why things had not been made right, and the casual
inference that such reasons could be lightly swept away as if by the
mere wave of a hand, implied a power appertaining to a time seeming so
lost forever that it was too much for her.

"Oh, Betty, Betty!" she cried, "you talk as if--you are so----!"

The fact, so simple to the members of the abnormal class to which she of
a truth belonged, the class which heaped up its millions, the absolute
knowledge that there was a great deal of money in the world and that she
was of those who were among its chief owners, had ceased to seem a fact,
and had vanished into the region of fairy stories.

That she could not believe it a reality revealed itself to Bettina, as
by a flash, which was also a revelation of many things. There would be
unpleasing truths to be learned, and she had not made her pilgrimage for
nothing. But--in any event--there were advantages without doubt in the
circumstance which subjected one to being perpetually pointed out as a
daughter of a multi-millionaire. As this argued itself out for her with
rapid lucidity, she bent and kissed Rosy once more. She even tried to
do it lightly, and not to allow the rush of love and pity in her soul to
betray her.

"I talk as if--as if I were Betty," she said. "You have forgotten. I
have not. I have been looking forward to this for years. I have been
planning to come to you since I was eleven years old. And here we sit."

"You didn't forget? You didn't?" faltered the poor wreck of Rosy. "Oh!
Oh! I thought you had all forgotten me--quite--quite!"

And her face went down in her spare, small hands, and she began