's from those wonderful women of Venice, then, that you get that
hair. Do you remember Browning's:

"'Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.'"

There was no response to his thought in her young eyes.

"I've never read Browning," she said, negligently, "and I hate to think
of 'dear dead women.' I want to think of live things, of bright things,
of gay things. It seems sometimes as if I should die here among the
shadows."

She was sobbing now, with her head on the table.

"Bettina," the doctor bent over her, "poor child, poor little child."

"Please let me go," she whispered.

"I can't keep you, of course. I wish I knew what to do. I wish Diana
were here."

"Diana?"

"I forgot that you did not know her. She has been away for two years.
She's rather wonderful, Bettina."

The girl raised her head. The man was gazing straight into the fire. All
the eager light that had made his face seem young had gone, and he
looked worn and tired. Bettina had no worldly intuitions to teach her
the reason for the change a woman's name had wrought, and so absorbed
was she in her own trouble that she viewed the transformation with
unseeing eyes.

"What could she do if she were here?" she asked with childish
directness.

"She would find some way out of it--she is very wise." He spoke with
some hesitation, as a man speaks who holds a subject sacred. "She has
had to decide things for herself all her life--her father and mother
died when she was a little girl; now she is over thirty and the mistress
of a large fortune. She spends her winters in the city and her summers
down here by the sea--but for the past two years she has been staying in
Europe with a widowed friend who was a schoolmate of hers in Berlin."

"When is she coming back?"

Out of a long silence, he answered, "I am not sure that she will come
back. Her engagement was announced last fall--to a German, Ulric Van
Rosen--she is to be married in June."

The fact, to him so pregnant of woeful possibilities, meant little to
Bettina.

"Of course if she's not here, she can't do anything--and anyhow most
people don't care to do practical things to help, do they?"

She looked so childish, so appealing, so altogether exquisite and young
in her black-robed slenderness, that he answered her as he would have
answered a child.

"It's too bad that the world should hurt you.