the occasions of his beating her had been in consequence of his finding her writing to her mother a letter blotted with tears.  Husbands frequently objected to their wives’ relatives, but there was a special order of European husband who opposed violently any intimacy with American relations on the practical ground that their views of a wife’s position, with regard to her husband, were of a revolutionary nature.

Mrs. Vanderpoel had in her possession every letter Rosalie or her husband had ever written.  Bettina asked to be allowed to read them, and one morning seated herself in her own room before a blazing fire, with the collection on a table at her side.  She read them in order.  Nigel’s began as they went on.  They were all in one tone, formal, uninteresting, and requiring no answers.  There was not a suggestion of human feeling in one of them.

“He wrote them,” said Betty, “so that we could not say that he had never written.”

Rosalie’s first epistles were affectionate, but timid.  At the outset she was evidently trying to conceal the fact that she was homesick.  Gradually she became briefer and more constrained.  In one she said pathetically, “I am such a bad letter writer.  I always feel as if I want to tear up what I have written, because I never say half that is in my heart.”  Mrs. Vanderpoel had kissed that letter many a time.  She was sure that a mark on the paper near this particular sentence was where a tear had fallen.  Bettina was sure of this, too, and sat and looked at the fire for some time.

That night she went to a ball, and when she returned home, she persuaded her mother to go to bed.

“I want to have a talk with father,” she exclaimed.  “I am going to ask him something.”

She went to the great man’s private room, where he sat at work, even after the hours when less seriously engaged people come home from balls.  The room he sat in was one of the apartments newspapers had with much detail described.  It was luxuriously comfortable, and its effect was sober and rich and fine.

When Bettina came in, Vanderpoel, looking up to smile at her in welcome, was struck by the fact that as a background to an entering figure of tall, splendid girlhood in a ball dress it was admirable, throwing up all its whiteness and grace and sweep of line.  He was always glad to see Betty.  The rich strength of the life radiating from her, the reality and glow of her were good for him and had the power of detaching him from work of which he was tired.

She smiled back at him, and, coming forward took her place in a big armchair close to him, her lace-frilled cloak slipping from her shoulders with a soft rustling sound which seemed to convey her intention to stay.

“Are you too busy to be interrupted?” she asked, her mellow voice caressing him.  “I want to talk to you about something I am going to do.”  She put out her hand and laid it on his with a clinging firmness which meant strong feeling.  “At least, I am going to do it if you will help me,” she ended.