She was, in truth, thinking things over, as she had been doing for some time.  She had asked questions on several occasions of English people she had met abroad.  But a schoolgirl cannot ask many questions, and though she had once met someone who knew Sir Nigel Anstruthers, it was a person who did not know him well, for the reason that she had not desired to increase her slight acquaintance.  This lady was the aunt of one of Bettina’s fellow pupils, and she was not aware of the girl’s relationship to Sir Nigel.  What Betty gathered was that her brother-in-law was regarded as a decidedly bad lot, that since his marriage to some American girl he had seemed to have money which he spent in riotous living, and that the wife, who was said to be a silly creature, was kept in the country, either because her husband did not want her in London, or because she preferred to stay at Stornham.  About the wife no one appeared to know anything, in fact.

“She is rather a fool, I believe, and Sir Nigel Anstruthers is the kind of man a simpleton would be obliged to submit to,” Bettina had heard the lady say.

Her own reflections upon these comments had led her through various paths of thought.  She could recall Rosalie’s girlhood, and what she herself, as an unconsciously observing child, had known of her character.  She remembered the simple impressionability of her mind.  She had been the most amenable little creature in the world.  Her yielding amiability could always be counted upon as a factor by the calculating; sweet-tempered to weakness, she could be beguiled or distressed into any course the desires of others dictated.  An ill-tempered or self-pitying person could alter any line of conduct she herself wished to pursue.

“She was neither clever nor strong-minded,” Betty said to herself.  “A man like Sir Nigel Anstruthers could make what he chose of her.  I wonder what he has done to her?”

Of one thing she thought she was sure.  This was that Rosalie’s aloofness from her family was the result of his design.

She comprehended, in her maturer years, the dislike of her childhood.  She remembered a certain look in his face which she had detested.  She had not known then that it was the look of a rather clever brute, who was malignant, but she knew now.

“He used to hate us all,” she said to herself.  “He did not mean to know us when he had taken Rosalie away, and he did not intend that she should know us.”

She had heard rumours of cases somewhat parallel, cases in which girls’ lives had become swamped in those of their husbands, and their husbands’ families.  And she had also heard unpleasant details of the means employed to reach the desired results.  Annie Butterfield’s husband had forbidden her to correspond with her American relatives.  He had argued that such correspondence was disturbing to her mind, and to the domestic duties which should be every decent woman’s religion.  One of