“I love you so much, Aunt Betty,” he cried.  “We both love you so much.  Something makes me love you to-day more than ever I did before.  It almost makes me cry.  I love you so.”

She stooped swiftly and drew him into her arms and kissed him close and hard.  He held his head back a little and looked into the blue under her lashes.

“I love your eyes,” he said.  “Anyone would love your eyes, Aunt Betty.  But what is the matter with them?  You are not crying at all, but—­oh! what is the matter?”

“No, I am not crying at all,” she said, and smiled—­almost laughed.

But after she had kissed him again she took her books and went upstairs.

She did not lie down, and she did not read when she was alone in her room.  She drew a long chair before the window and watched the slow falling of the rain.  There is nothing like it—­that slow weeping of the rain on an English autumn day.  Soft and light though it was, the park began to look sodden.  The bare trees held out their branches like imploring arms, the brown garden beds were neat and bare.  The same rain was drip-dripping at Mount Dunstan—­upon the desolate great house—­upon the village—­upon the mounds and ancient stone tombs in the churchyard, sinking into the earth—­sinking deep, sucked in by the clay beneath—­the cold damp clay.  She shook herself shudderingly.  Why should the thought come to her—­the cold damp clay?  She would not listen to it, she would think of New York, of its roaring streets and crash of sound, of the rush of fierce life there—­of her father and mother.  She tried to force herself to call up pictures of Broadway, swarming with crowds of black things, which, seen from the windows of its monstrous buildings, seemed like swarms of ants, burst out of ant-hills, out of a thousand ant-hills.  She tried to remember shop windows, the things in them, the throngs going by, and the throngs passing in and out of great, swinging glass doors.  She dragged up before her a vision of Rosalie, driving with her mother and herself, looking about her at the new buildings and changed streets, flushed and made radiant by the accelerated pace and excitement of her beloved New York.  But, oh, the slow, penetrating rainfall, and—­the cold damp clay!

She rose, making an involuntary sound which was half a moan.  The long mirror set between two windows showed her momentarily an awful young figure, throwing up its arms.  Was that Betty Vanderpoel—­that?

“What does one do,” she said, “when the world comes to an end?  What does one do?”

All her days she had done things—­there had always been something to do.  Now there was nothing.  She went suddenly to her bell and rang for her maid.  The woman answered the summons at once.

“Send word to the stable that I want Childe Harold.  I do not want Mason.  I shall ride alone.”

“Yes, miss,” Ambleston answered, without any exterior sign of emotion.  She was too well-trained a person to express any shade of her internal amazement.  After she had transmitted the order to the proper manager she returned and changed her mistress’s costume.