a long, slim, round arm with a wonderful power to caress in its curves.
She kissed Vanderpoel's lined cheek.

"Have you had time to think much about Rosy?" she said.

"I've not had time, but I've done it," he answered. "Anything that hurts
your mother hurts me. Sometimes she begins to cry in her sleep, and when
I wake her she tells me she has been dreaming that she has seen Rosy."

"I have had time to think of her," said Bettina. "I have heard so much
of these things. I was at school in Germany when Annie Butterfield and
Baron von Steindahl were married. I heard it talked about there, and
then my mother sent me some American papers."

She laughed a little, and for a moment her laugh did not sound like a
girl's.

"Well, it's turned out badly enough," her father commented. "The papers
had plenty to say about it later. There wasn't much he was too good to
do to his wife, apparently."

"There was nothing too bad for him to do before he had a wife," said
Bettina. "He was black. It was an insolence that he should have dared to
speak to Annie Butterfield. Somebody ought to have beaten him."

"He beat her instead."

"Yes, and I think his family thought it quite natural. They said that
she was so vulgar and American that she exasperated Frederick beyond
endurance. She was not geboren, that was it." She laughed her severe