letter she wrote to her father after he had forwarded the money she
asked for. It was a little study in water colours of the head of her
boy. It was nothing but a head, the shoulders being fancifully draped,
but the face was a peculiar one. It was over-mature, and unlovely, but
for a mouth at once pathetic and sweet.

"He is not a pretty child," sighed Mrs. Vanderpoel. "I should have
thought Rosy would have had pretty babies. Ughtred is more like his
father than his mother."

She spoke to her husband later, of what Betty had said.

"What do you think she has in her mind, Reuben?" she asked.

"What Betty has in her mind is usually good sense," was his response.
"She will begin to talk to me about it presently. I shall not ask
questions yet. She is probably thinking: things over."

She was, in truth, thinking things over, as she had been doing for some
time. She had asked questions on several occasions of English people she
had met abroad. But a schoolgirl cannot ask many questions, and though
she had once met someone who knew Sir Nigel Anstruthers, it was a person
who did not know him well, for the reason that she had not desired
to increase her slight acquaintance. This lady was the aunt of one
of Bettina's fellow pupils, and she was not aware of the girl's
relationship to Sir Nigel. What Betty gathered was that her
brother-in-law was regarded as a decidedly bad lot, that since his
marriage to some American girl he had seemed to have money which he
spent in riotous living, and that the wife, who was said to be a silly
creature, was kept in the country, either because her husband did not