"Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" she cried."You are just as wonderful as you looked when I turned and saw you under the trees.You almost make me afraid.""Because I am wonderful?" said Betty."Then I will not be wonderful any more.""It is not because I think you wonderful, but because other people will.Would you rebuild a great house?" hesitatingly.
The fine line of Betty's black brows drew itself slightly together.
"No," she said.
"Wouldn't you?"
"How could the man who owned it persuade me that he was in earnest if he said he loved me? How could I persuade him that I was worth caring for and not a mere ambitious fool?
There would be too much against us."
"Against you?" repeated Lady Anstruthers.
"I don't say I am fair," said Betty."People who are proud are often not fair.But we should both of us have seen and known too much.""You have seen me now," said Lady Anstruthers in her listless voice, and at the same moment dinner was announced and she got up from the sofa, so that, luckily, there was no time for the impersonal answer it would have been difficult to invent at a moment's notice.As they went into the dining-room Betty was thinking restlessly.She remembered all the material she had collected during her education in France and Germany, and there was added to it the fact that she HADseen Rosy, and having her before her eyes she felt that there was small prospect of her contemplating the rebuilding of any great house requiring reconstruction.
There was fine panelling in the dining-room and a great fireplace and a few family portraits.The service upon the table was shabby and the dinner was not a bounteous meal.
Lady Anstruthers in her girlish, gauzy dress and looking too small for her big, high-backed chair tried to talk rapidly, and every few minutes forgot herself and sank into silence, with her eyes unconsciously fixed upon her sister's face.Ughtred watched Betty also, and with a hungry questioning.The man-servant in the worn livery was not a sufficiently well-trained and experienced domestic to make any effort to keep his eyes from her.He was young enough to be excited by an innovation so unusual as the presence of a young and beautiful person surrounded by an unmistakable atmosphere of ease and fearlessness.He had been talking of her below stairs and felt that he had failed in describing her.He had found himself barely supported by the suggestion of a housemaid that sometimes these dresses that looked plain had been made in Paris at expensive places and had cost "a lot." He furtively examined the dress which looked plain, and while he admitted that for some mysterious reason it might represent expensiveness, it was not the dress which was the secret of the effect, but a something, not altogether mere good looks, expressed by the wearer.It was, in fact, the thing which the second-class passenger, Salter, had been at once attracted and stirred to rebellion by when Miss Vanderpoel came on board the Meridiana.
Betty did not look too small for her high-backed chair, and she did not forget herself when she talked.In spite of all she had found, her imagination was stirred by the surroundings.
Her sense of the fine spaces and possibilities of dignity in the barren house, her knowledge that outside the windows there lay stretched broad views of the park and its heavy-branched trees, and that outside the gates stood the neglected picturesqueness of the village and all the rural and--to her--interesting life it slowly lived--this pleased and attracted her.
If she had been as helpless and discouraged as Rosalie she could see that it would all have meant a totally different and depressing thing, but, strong and spirited, and with the power of full hands, she was remotely rejoicing in what might be done with it all.As she talked she was gradually learning detail.
Sir Nigel was on the Continent.Apparently he often went there; also it revealed itself that no one knew at what moment he might return, for what reason he would return, or if he would return at all during the summer.It was evident that no one had been at any time encouraged to ask questions as to his intentions, or to feel that they had a right to do so.
This she knew, and a number of other things, before they left the table.When they did so they went out to stroll upon the moss-grown stone terrace and listened to the nightingales throwingminto the air silver fountains of trilling song.When Bettinapaused, leaning against the balustrade of the terrace that she might hear all the beauty of it, and feel all the beauty of the warm spring night, Rosy went on making her effort to talk.
