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Up above them the little stars blinked down, and the warm wind touched their faces as they went. The soft darkness shut them in. There was only the child, clinging to Achilles's great hand and hurrying through the night. Far in the distance, a dull, sullen glow lit the sky the city's glow and Betty's home, out there beneath it, in the dark. But the child did not know.
Burned down the shack itself to keep you warm, I reckon!" chuckled Jaroth. "Well, we'd better take this girl along with us, hadn't we, Mr. Gordon? She'll set fire to the timber next, if we don't, after she's used up the shack." "We most surely will take her along to Mountain Camp," declared Betty's uncle. "But what puzzles me, is how she ever got here to this, lonely place."
She could not be expected to know that her stepfather had known as "Lizzie" the girl who, if Fate had been kind, would have been his wife or the mother of his child. Betty's letters breathed contempt of Parish matters, weariness of the dulness of the country, and exasperation at the hardness of a lot where "nothing ever happened." Well, something had happened now.
But we lost sight of the ignoble features of the occasion when the sublime office for the Burial of the Dead began. When it was ended I understood one of Betty's brusque remarks, which had puzzled me when it came out at breakfast-time. "You'll 'ave to take what ye can get for your dinners, gentlemen," she had said; "for the singers is to meet at three, and I can't pretend to do more nor I can."
Something cracked in him at Betty's words. She jumped, warned by the sudden blaze in his eyes. But he caught her with a movement quicker than her own. He held her by the arms with fingers that gripped like iron clamps. He shook her. "You wonder if I really care," he cried. "My God, can't you see? Can't you feel? Must a man grovel and weep and rave?"
All these thoughts and many more were crowding Betty's brain as she ran down the steps of the Verplanck mansion and followed Peter toward Queen Street, where Kitty lived. The sun shone brightly and the air was crisp and clear; Betty looked charming in her dainty hood, tied with a rose-colored ribbon which nestled softly under her chin and played at confining the dancing curls.
It seemed like a new world to some young folks who were there, and everybody was surprised because everybody else looked so pretty and was so surprisingly gay. Yet, here it was, the same old Tideshead after all! "Aunt Barbara," said Betty, as that aunt sat on the side of Betty's four-post bed, "Aunt Barbara, don't say good-night just yet.
He stopped and asked himself what he knew now that he had not known then, refused himself the answer, and went to call on Lady St. Craye. Christmas came and went; the black winds of January swept the Boulevards, and snow lay white on the walls of court and garden. Betty's life was full now. The empty cage that had opened its door to love at Long Barton had now other occupants.
The evening was dry and windy, and, excepting that the sun did not shine, strongly reminded Tupcombe of the evening of that March month, nearly five years earlier, when news had been brought to King's-Hintock Court of the child Betty's marriage in London news which had produced upon Dornell such a marked effect for the worse ever since, and indirectly upon the household of which he was the head.
Then he held out his hand. "Goodby," he added. "Are you going good-by, Mr. Carrington," and Betty's fingers tingled with his masterful clasp long after he had gone. Carrington sauntered slowly down the path to the highroad. "She didn't ask me to come back an oversight," he told himself cheerfully. Just beyond the gates he met that same young fellow he had seen at New Madrid.
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