From being full of joy Timmy’s face became downcast and sullen.

“Hullo!” Radmore called out, “I want you to show me the garden, Timmy.  Where’s Betty?”

“She’s in the scullery, of course.  I tell you I have done, Rosamund.  You are a cruel pig—­”

“Come, Timmy, don’t speak to your sister like that.”

It ended in the three of them going off—­Rosamund to look for the prescription, and the other two into the garden.

* * * * *

Nanna waddled into the scullery:  “I’ll wipe up them things, Miss Betty,” she said good-naturedly; “you go out to Mr. Godfrey and Master Timmy—­they was asking for you just now.”

Betty hesitated—­and then suddenly she made up her mind that, yes, she would do as Nanna suggested.

In early Victorian days women of Betty Tosswill’s class and kind worked many of their most anxious thoughts and fears, hopes and fancies, into the various forms of needlework which were then considered the only suitable kind of occupation for a young gentlewoman; and often Betty, when engaged on the long and arduous task of washing up for her big family party, pondered over the problems and secret anxieties which assailed her.  Though something of a pain, it had also been to her a great relief to realise that the living flesh and blood Godfrey Radmore of to-day had ousted the passionately devoted, if unreasonable and violent, lover of her early girlhood.  In the old days, intermingled with her deep love of Radmore, there had been a protective, almost maternal, feeling, and although Radmore had been four years older than herself, she had always felt the older of the two.  But now, in spite of the responsible, anxious work she had done in France during the War, she felt that the roles were reversed, and that her one-time lover had become infinitely older than she was herself in knowledge of the world.

Old Nanna hoped that Miss Betty would go upstairs and change her plain cotton dress for something just a little prettier and that she would put on, maybe, a hat trimmed with daisies which Nanna admired.  But Betty did nothing of the sort.  She washed her hands at the sink, and then she went out into the hall, and taking up her big plain old garden hat went straight out into the keen autumnal air.

And then, as she caught sight of the tall man and of the little boy, she stayed her steps, overwhelmed by a flood of both sweet and bitter memories.

During the year which had followed the breaking of her engagement there had been corners and by-ways of the big, rambling old garden filled with poignant, almost unbearable, associations of the days when she and Godfrey had been lovers.  There had been certain nooks and hidden oases where it had been agony to go.  She had considered all kinds of things as being possible.  Perhaps her most certain conviction had been that he would come back some day with a wife whom she, Betty, would try to teach herself to love; but never had she visioned what had now actually occurred, that is Radmore’s quiet, commonplace falling-back into the day-to-day life of Old Place.