She had not expected to say it, but she had said it.  Lady Anstruthers looked at her fascinated, and then she covered her face with her hands, huddling herself in a heap as she knelt on the rug, looking singularly small and frail.

“Betty,” she said presently, in a new, awful little voice, “I—­I will tell you something.  I never thought I should dare to tell anyone alive.  I have shuddered at it myself.  There have been days—­awful, helpless days, when I was sure there was no hope for me in all the world—­when deep down in my soul I understood what women felt when they murdered people—­crept to them in their wicked sleep and struck them again—­and again—­and again.  Like that!” She sat up suddenly, as if she did not know what she was doing, and uncovering her little ghastly face struck downward three fierce times at nothingness—­but as if it were not nothingness, and as if she held something in her hand.

There was horror in it—­Betty sprang at the hand and caught it.

“No! no!” she cried out.  “Poor little Rosy!  Darling little Rosy!  No! no! no!”

That instant Lady Anstruthers looked up at her shocked and awake.  She was Rosy again, and clung to her, holding to her dress, piteous and panting.

“No! no!” she said.  “When it came to me in the night—­it was always in the night—­I used to get out of bed and pray that it might never, never come again, and that I might be forgiven—­just forgiven.  It was too horrible that I should even understand it so well.”  A woeful, wry little smile twisted her mouth.  “I was not brave enough to have done it.  I could never have done it, Betty; but the thought was there—­it was there!  I used to think it had made a black mark on my soul.”

. . . . .

The letter took long to write.  It led a consecutive story up to the point where it culminated in a situation which presented itself as no longer to be dealt with by means at hand.  Parts of the story previous letters had related, though some of them it had not seemed absolutely necessary to relate in detail.  Now they must be made clear, and Betty made them so.

“Because you trusted me you made me trust myself,” was one of the things she wrote.  “For some time I felt that it was best to fight for my own hand without troubling you.  I hoped perhaps I might be able to lead things to a decorous sort of issue.  I saw that secretly Rosy hoped and prayed that it might be possible.  She gave up expecting happiness before she was twenty, and mere decent peace would have seemed heaven to her, if she could have been allowed sometimes to see those she loved and longed for.  Now that I must give up my hope—­which was perhaps a rather foolish one—­and now that I cannot remain at Stornham, she would have no defence at all if she were left alone.  Her condition would be more hopeless than before, because Nigel would never forget that we had tried to rescue her and had failed.  If I were a man, or if I were very much older, I need not be actually driven away, but as it is I think that you must come and take the matter into your own hands.”