"But Clara always was a conceited girl," thought Betty. "She was always
patronising people, and Rosy was only pretty and sweet. She always said
herself that she had no brains. But she had a heart."

After the lapse of a few years there had been no further discussion of
plans for visiting Stornham. Rosalie had become so remote as to appear
almost unreachable. She had been presented at Court, she had had three
children, the Dowager Lady Anstruthers had died. Once she had written
to her father to ask for a large sum of money, which he had sent to
her, because she seemed to want it very much. She required it to pay off
certain debts on the estate and spoke touchingly of her boy who would
inherit.

"He is a delicate boy, father," she wrote, "and I don't want the estate
to come to him burdened."

When she received the money she wrote gratefully of the generosity shown
her, but she spoke very vaguely of the prospect of their seeing each
other in the future. It was as if she felt her own remoteness even more
than they felt it themselves.

In the meantime Bettina had been taken to France and placed at school
there. The resulting experience was an enlightening one, far more
illuminating to the quick-witted American child than it would have been
to an English, French, or German one, who would not have had so much to
learn, and probably would not have been so quick at the learning.

Betty Vanderpoel knew nothing which was not American, and only vaguely
a few things which were not of New York. She had lived in Fifth Avenue,
attended school in a numbered street near her own home, played in and