“No, I don’t think I do.”  Betty winked away the tears.  “It’s George I’m really thinking of, Nanna.”

“But the dear lad is in the Kingdom of the Blessed, my dear.  You wouldn’t have him back—­surely?”

“Not if he’s really happier where he is,” said the girl, “but oh, Nanna, it’s so hard to believe that.”  She went across to the big old-fashioned kitchen range, and poured the boiling water into a little silver teapot.  Then she took the tray to her step-mother’s room.

Next she went down into the drawing-room—­she always “did” that room while Nanna laid the breakfast with the help of the village girl who, although she was supposed to come in at seven, very seldom turned up till eight.  And then, while Betty was carefully dusting the quaint, old-fashioned Staffordshire figures on the mantelpiece, the door opened, and Nanna came in and shut it behind her.  “There isn’t any wine,” she began mysteriously.  “Gentlemen do like a little drop of wine after their dinner.”

“I think what father and Jack can do without, Mr. Radmore can do without, too,” said Betty.  For the first time her colour heightened.  “In any case, I don’t see how we can get anything fit to drink by this evening.”

“I was thinking, Miss Betty, that you might borrow a bottle of port wine at Rose Cottage.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” said Betty decidedly, “you see, Miss Pendarth’s port is very good port, and we could never give her back a bottle of the same quality.”

And then, as Nanna sidled towards the door, the old woman suddenly remarked, a little irrelevantly:—­“I suppose you’ve told Miss Pendarth that Mr. Godfrey is coming, Miss Betty?”

Betty looked round quickly.  “No,” she said, “I haven’t had a chance yet.  Thank you for reminding me.”

The old woman slipped away, and Betty suddenly wondered whether Nanna had really come in to ask that question as to Miss Pendarth.  Somehow Betty suspected that she had.

CHAPTER VII

It was about eleven, when most of her household chores were done, that Betty started off to pay an informal call on Miss Pendarth, in some ways the most outstanding personality in the village of Beechfield.

“Busybody”—­“mischief-maker”—­“a very kind lady”—­“a disagreeable woman”—­“a fearful snob”—­“a true Christian”—­were some of the epithets which had been, and were still, used, to describe the woman to whose house, Rose Cottage, Betty Tosswill, with a slight feeling of discomfort bordering on pain, began wending her way.

Olivia Pendarth and her colourless younger sister, Anne, the latter now long dead, had settled down at Beechfield in the nineties of the last century.  When both over thirty years of age, they had selected Beechfield as a dwelling-place because of its quiet charm and nearness to London.  Also because Rose Cottage, which, in spite of its unassuming name, was, if a small yet a substantial, red-brick house with a good garden, paddock and stables, exactly suited them, as to price, and as to the accommodation they then wanted.  The surviving sister was now rather over sixty, and her income was very much smaller than it had been, but it never even occurred to her to try and sell what had become to her a place of mingled painful and happy memories.