There was a huge stable yard, and Betty passed through that on her way back.  The door of the carriage house was open and she saw two or three tumbled-down vehicles.  One was a landau with a wheel off, one was a shabby, old-fashioned, low phaeton.  She caught sight of a patently venerable cob in one of the stables.  The stalls near him were empty.

“I suppose that is all they have to depend upon,” she thought.  “And the stables are like the gardens.”

She found Lady Anstruthers and Ughtred waiting for her upon the terrace, each of them regarding her with an expression suggestive of repressed curiosity as she approached.  Lady Anstruthers flushed a little and went to meet her with an eager kiss.

“You look like—­I don’t know quite what you look like, Betty!” she exclaimed.

The girl’s dimple deepened and her eyes said smiling things.

“It is the morning—­and your gardens,” she answered.  “I have been round your gardens.”

“They were beautiful once, I suppose,” said Rosy deprecatingly.

“They are beautiful now.  There is nothing like them in America at least.”

“I don’t remember any gardens in America,” Lady Anstruthers owned reluctantly, “but everything seemed so cheerful and well cared for and—­and new.  Don’t laugh, Betty.  I have begun to like new things.  You would if you had watched old ones tumbling to pieces for twelve years.”

“They ought not to be allowed to tumble to pieces,” said Betty.  She added her next words with simple directness.  She could only discover how any advancing steps would be taken by taking them.  “Why do you allow them to do it?”

Lady Anstruthers looked away, but as she looked her eyes passed Ughtred’s.

“I!” she said.  “There are so many other things to do.  It would cost so much—­such an enormity to keep it all in order.”

“But it ought to be done—­for Ughtred’s sake.”

“I know that,” faltered Rosy, “but I can’t help it.”

“You can,” answered Betty, and she put her arm round her as they turned to enter the house.  “When you have become more used to me and my driving American ways I will show you how.”

The lightness with which she said it had an odd effect on Lady Anstruthers.  Such casual readiness was so full of the suggestion of unheard of possibilities that it was a kind of shock.

“I have been twelve years in getting un-used to you—­I feel as if it would take twelve years more to get used again,” she said.

“It won’t take twelve weeks,” said Betty.

CHAPTER XV

THE FIRST MAN

The mystery of the apparently occult methods of communication among the natives of India, between whom, it is said, news flies by means too strange and subtle to be humanly explainable, is no more difficult a problem to solve than that of the lightning rapidity with which a knowledge of the transpiring of any new local event darts through the slowest, and, as far as outward signs go, the least communicative English village slumbering drowsily among its pastures and trees.