tween her
teeth, her eyes pondering. She might, she knew, have said 'No.' Prudence
Varley neither offered nor demanded adornment of speech. It was an open
question she had asked, to be answered truly. 'No' would have sent her
simply away without comment or offence.

Betty considered 'No,' and rejected it, perhaps because the direct eyes
seemed no longer to hold everything back; perhaps because, like a child
hurt and bewildered, she wanted help; perhaps because, from the first to
the last, she had always so liked Prudence Varley.

She said 'Yes,' and came forward and cleared a space in her own chair,
and sat down herself on the arm of Tommy's. The clearing of Tommy's
would have been too arduous a task.

Prudence sat down simply, unembarrassed. But Betty's thin, childish
fingers, clasped round her knee, worked nervously in and out; she
clenched her teeth over her lower lip.

'How is your brother?' Prudence said.

'B-better. He talked to-day, quite a lot.'

That extremely probable fact, Prudence perhaps thought, could hardly be
taken as conclusive proof of the Crevequers' good health. But she said:

'I am very glad. Then he may be up before very long, perhaps?'

'I don't know how long; they c-can't tell me.' Betty stammered a good
deal over it. She paused for recovery. 'When he's well enough,' she
resumed, 'we want to go north for a rest.'

'To England?'

'No. Oh no; that w-wouldn't be a rest. To Santa Caterina. It's our home;
we used to live there.... Tommy won't be able to do much for some time.'

'No; of course. You won't come back till the autumn, when it's cooler, I
expect.'

The two looks met, the one faintly questioning and half asking pardon
for the question, the other with all its depth of sad bewilderment
stirred--a miserable gaze like a child's.

'I don't know,' said Betty, and bit her lip. Then quite suddenly the
depths surged up and broke through. Her sad eyes hung on the lucid grey
ones that looked with such gentleness at her. 'I don't know--oh, I don't
know.... I don't know what we can do ... how we're to do it.... Can't
you tell me?... Because it's been you, you know, who've spoilt
things.... And what next?'

Prudence accepted it, meeting the claim with puckered brows of thought.
She did not know what next. She was an idealist, of a continual and
never-failing hope; but, striving to see, she saw only roads running
eternally sundered, as Betty too had seen them from the first hour of
compre