“A long letter, which I wish him to receive before he sails.  He might decide to act upon it before leaving New York, to advise with some legal authority he knows and trusts, to prepare our mother in some way—­to do some wise thing we cannot foresee the value of.  He has known the outline of the story, but not exact details—­particularly recent ones.  I have held back nothing it was necessary he should know.  I am going out to post the letter myself.  I shall send a cable asking him to prepare to come to us after he has reflected on what I have written.”

Rosalie was very quiet, but when, having left the room to prepare to go to the village, Betty came back to say a last word, her sister came to her and laid her hand on her arm.

“I have been so weak and trodden upon for years that it would not be natural for you to quite trust me,” she said.  “But I won’t fail you, Betty—­I won’t.”

The winter was drawing in, the last autumn days were short and often grey and dreary; the wind had swept the leaves from the trees and scattered them over park lands and lanes, where they lay a mellow-hued, rustling carpet, shifting with each chill breeze that blew.  The berried briony garlands clung to the bared hedges, and here and there flared scarlet, still holding their red defiantly until hard frosts should come to shrivel and blacken them.  The rare hours of sunshine were amber hours instead of golden.

As she passed through the park gate Betty was thinking of the first morning on which she had walked down the village street between the irregular rows of red-tiled cottages with the ragged little enclosing gardens.  Then the air and sunshine had been of the just awakening spring, now the sky was brightly cold, and through the small-paned windows she caught glimpses of fireglow.  A bent old man walking very slowly, leaning upon two sticks, had a red-brown woollen muffler wrapped round his neck.  Seeing her, he stopped and shuffled the two sticks into one hand that he might leave the other free to touch his wrinkled forehead stiffly, his face stretching into a slow smile as she stopped to speak to him.

“Good-morning, Marlow,” he said.  “How is the rheumatism to-day?”

He was a deaf old man, whose conversation was carried on principally by guesswork, and it was easy for him to gather that when her ladyship’s handsome young sister had given him greeting she had not forgotten to inquire respecting the “rheumatics,” which formed the greater part of existence.

“Mornin’, miss—­mornin’,” he answered in the high, cracked voice of rural ancientry.  “Winter be nigh, an’ they damp days be full of rheumatiz.  ’T’int easy to get about on my old legs, but I be main thankful for they warm things you sent, miss.  This ’ere,” fumbling at his red-brown muffler proudly, “’tis a comfort on windy days, so ‘tis, and warmth be a good thing to a man when he be goin’ down hill in years.”

“All of you who are not able to earn your own fires shall be warm this winter,” her ladyship’s handsome sister said, speaking closer to his ear.  “You shall all be warm.  Don’t be afraid of the cold days coming.”