When he left his wife to take his train to town, he left her smiling again.  She scarcely knew how her fears had been dispelled.  His talk had all been kindly, practical, and reasonable.  It was true Betty had said in her letter that Rosy had been rather delicate, and had not been taking very good care of herself, but that was to be remedied.  Rosy had made a little joke or so about it herself.

“Betty says I am not fat enough for an English matron.  I am drinking milk and breakfasting in bed, and am going to be massaged to please her.  I believe we all used to obey Betty when she was a child, and now she is so tall and splendid, one would never dare to cross her.  Oh, mother!  I am so happy at having her with me!”

To reread just these simple things caused the suggestion of things not comfortably normal to melt away.  Mrs. Vanderpoel sat down at a sunny window with her lap full of letters, and forgot Milly Bowen’s floundering.

When Mr. Vanderpoel reached his office and glanced at his carefully arranged morning’s mail, Mr. Germen saw him smile at the sight of the envelopes addressed in his daughter’s hand.  He sat down to read them at once, and, as he read, the smile of welcome became a shrewd and deeply interested one.

“She has undertaken a good-sized contract,” he was saying to himself, “and she’s to be trusted to see it through.  It is rather fine, the way she manages to combine emotions and romance and sentiments with practical good business, without letting one interfere with the other.  It’s none of it bad business this, as the estate is entailed, and the boy is Rosy’s.  It’s good business.”

This was what Betty had written to her father in New York from Stornham Court.

“The things I am beginning to do, it would be impossible for me to resist doing, and it would certainly be impossible for you.  The thing I am seeing I have never seen, at close hand, before, though I have taken in something almost its parallel as part of certain picturesqueness of scenes in other countries.  But I am living with this and also, through relationship to Rosy, I, in a measure, belong to it, and it belongs to me.  You and I may have often seen in American villages crudeness, incompleteness, lack of comfort, and the composition of a picture, a rough ugliness the result of haste and unsettled life which stays nowhere long, but packs up its goods and chattels and wanders farther afield in search of something better or worse, in any case in search of change, but we have never seen ripe, gradual falling to ruin of what generations ago was beautiful.  To me it is wonderful and tragic and touching.  If you could see the Court, if you could see the village, if you could see the church, if you could see the people, all quietly disintegrating, and so dearly perfect in their way that if one knew absolutely that nothing could be done to save them, one could only stand still and catch one’s breath and burst into tears.