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"Mother!" Rosy breathed, with a soft little gasp. "Mother!" and turned her face farther away. "What did you tell her?" Betty moved over to her and stood close at her side. The power of her personality enveloped the tremulous creature as if it had been a sense of warmth. "I told her how beautiful the place was, and how Ughtred adored you and how you loved us all, and longed to see New York again."
Ffolliott like murdering his mother and mine and like murdering Ughtred, because he would be killed by the shame of things and by being taken from me. We have loved each other so much so much. Don't you see?" "I see all that rises up before you," Betty said, "and I understand your feeling that you cannot save yourself by bringing ruin upon an innocent man who helped you.
"She likes that, too," said Ughtred, and, although he said it sheepishly, there was imperfectly concealed beneath the awkwardness a pleasure in the fact. "Do you?" asked Rosalie, with her small, painful smile. Betty laughed. "It is too picturesque, in its special way, to be quite credible," she said. "I thought that when I first saw it," said Rosy. "Don't you think so, now?"
The groom got down from the box, and two men-servants appeared upon the steps. Lady Anstruthers descended, laughing a little as she talked to Ughtred, who had been with her. She was dressed in clear, pale grey, and the soft rose lining of her parasol warmed the colour of her skin. Sir Nigel paused a second and put up his glass. "Is that my wife?" he said. "Really! She quite recalls New York."
It was the natural affectionate expression of her feeling, but tears started to Rosy's eyes, and the boy Ughtred, who had sat down in a window seat, turned red again, and shifted in his place. "Oh, Betty!" was Rosy's faint nervous exclamation, "you seem so beautiful and so so strange that you frighten me." Betty laughed with the softest possible cheerfulness, shaking her a little.
Blackburn seemed to enjoy the same kind of protection as Ughtred, and practised the same atrocities, torturing and imprisoning his captives unless they were heavily ransomed. He also led a life of wildest licence, and, when not engaged in some predatory exploit, spent his time in carousing with his followers.
The harrowing thought passed through Betty's mind that she looked almost like a limp bundle of shabby clothes. She was so helpless in her pathetic, apologetic hysteria. "I shall be better," she gasped. "It's nothing. Ughtred, tell her." "She's very weak, really," said the boy Ughtred, in his mature way. "She can't help it sometimes. I'll get some water from the pool."
"And the other man who is always with them is that short, stout, red-faced old fellow standing over there with the lady in pale blue, Sir Ughtred Gardner. Mr. Woodroffe has nicknamed him 'Sir Putrid." And we both laughed. "Of course, don't say I said so," she whispered. "They don't call him that to his face, but it's so easy to make a mistake in his name when he's not within hearing.
When they drove together in this way they were usually both of them rather silent and quiet, but now Rosalie spoke of many things of Ughtred, of Nigel, of the Dunholms, of New York, and their father and mother. "I want to talk because I'm nervous, I think," she said half apologetically. "I do not want to sit still and think too much of father's coming. You don't mind my talking, do you, Betty?"
She spoke unconsciously half aloud, and Ughtred heard her and replied hurriedly. "Yes," he said, "you must make yourself keep still. That is what we have to do whatever happens. That is one of the things mother wanted you to know. She is afraid. She daren't let you " She turned from the window, standing at her full height and looking very tall for a girl. "She is afraid? She daren't?
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