and sumptuous hotel evolved itself from their astute knowledge of common facts.  At the entrances of these hotels, omnibuses and cabs, laden with trunks and packages frequently bearing labels marked with red letters “S.  S. So-and-So, Stateroom—­Hold—­Baggage-room,” drew up and deposited their contents and burdens at regular intervals.  Then men with keen, and often humorous faces or almost painfully anxious ones, their exceedingly well-dressed wives, and more or less attractive and vivacious-looking daughters, their eager little girls, and un-English-looking little boys, passed through the corridors in flocks and took possession of suites of rooms, sometimes for twenty-four hours, sometimes for six weeks.

The Worthingtons took possession of such a suite in such a hotel.  Bettina Vanderpoel’s apartments faced the Embankment.  From her windows she could look out at the broad splendid, muddy Thames, slowly rolling in its grave, stately way beneath its bridges, bearing with it heavy lumbering barges, excited tooting little penny steamers and craft of various shapes and sizes, the errand or burden of each meaning a different story.

It had been to Bettina one of her pleasures of the finest epicurean flavour to reflect that she had never had any brief and superficial knowledge of England, as she had never been to the country at all in those earlier years, when her knowledge of places must necessarily have been always the incomplete one of either a schoolgirl traveller or a schoolgirl resident, whose views were limited by the walls of restriction built around her.

If relations of the usual ease and friendliness had existed between Lady Anstruthers and her family, Bettina would, doubtless, have known her sister’s adopted country well.  It would have been a thing so natural as to be almost inevitable, that she would have crossed the Channel to spend her holidays at Stornham.  As matters had stood, however, the child herself, in the days when she had been a child, had had most definite private views on the subject of visits to England.  She had made up her young mind absolutely that she would not, if it were decently possible to avoid it, set her foot upon English soil until she was old enough and strong enough to carry out what had been at first her passionately romantic plans for discovering and facing the truth of the reason for the apparent change in Rosy.  When she went to England, she would go to Rosy.  As she had grown older, having in the course of education and travel seen most Continental countries, she had liked to think that she had saved, put aside for less hasty consumption and more delicate appreciation of flavours, as it were, the country she was conscious she cared for most.