“I can’t believe you,” she cried out again, and began to shiver.  “Betty!  Little Betty?  No!  No! it isn’t!”

She turned to the boy, who had lifted his chin from his stick, and was staring.

“Ughtred!  Ughtred!” she called to him.  “Come!  She says—­she says——­”

She sat down upon a clump of heather and began to cry.  She hid her face in her spare hands and broke into sobbing.

“Oh, Betty!  No!” she gasped.  “It’s so long ago—­it’s so far away.  You never came—­no one—­no one—­came!”

The hunchbacked boy drew near.  He had limped up on his stick.  He spoke like an elderly, affectionate gnome, not like a child.

“Don’t do that, mother,” he said.  “Don’t let it upset you so, whatever it is.”

“It’s so long ago; it’s so far away!” she wept, with catches in her breath and voice.  “You never came!”

Betty knelt down and enfolded her again.  Her bell-like voice was firm and clear.

“I have come now,” she said.  “And it is not far away.  A cable will reach father in two hours.”

Pursuing a certain vivid thought in her mind, she looked at her watch.

“If you spoke to mother by cable this moment,” she added, with accustomed coolness, and she felt her sister actually start as she spoke, “she could answer you by five o’clock.”

Lady Anstruther’s start ended in a laugh and gasp more hysteric than her first.  There was even a kind of wan awakening in her face, as she lifted it to look at the wonderful newcomer.  She caught her hand and held it, trembling, as she weakly laughed.

“It must be Betty,” she cried.  “That little stern way!  It is so like her.  Betty—­Betty—­dear!” She fell into a sobbing, shaken heap upon the heather.  The harrowing thought passed through Betty’s mind that she looked almost like a limp bundle of shabby clothes.  She was so helpless in her pathetic, apologetic hysteria.

“I shall—­be better,” she gasped.  “It’s nothing.  Ughtred, tell her.”

“She’s very weak, really,” said the boy Ughtred, in his mature way.  “She can’t help it sometimes.  I’ll get some water from the pool.”

“Let me go,” said Betty, and she darted down to the water.  She was back in a moment.  The boy was rubbing and patting his mother’s hands tenderly.

“At any rate,” he remarked, as one consoled by a reflection, “father is not at home.”

CHAPTER XI

“I thought you had all forgotten.”

As, after a singular half hour spent among the bracken under the trees, they began their return to the house, Bettina felt that her sense of adventure had altered its character.  She was still in the midst of a remarkable sort of exploit, which might end anywhere or in anything, but it had become at once more prosaic in detail and more intense in its significance.  What its significance might prove likely to be when