Ughtred had got down at once from his seat and limped forward.  His unprepossessing face looked as if he pulled his childishness together with an unchildish effort.

“She means,” he said, in his awkward way, “that she doesn’t know how to make you comfortable.  The rooms are all so shabby—­everything is so shabby.  Perhaps you won’t stay when you see.”

Bettina perceptibly increased the firmness of her hold on her sister’s body.  It was as if she drew it nearer to her side in a kind of taking possession.  She knew that the moment had come when she might go this far, at least, without expressing alarming things.

“You cannot show me anything that will frighten me,” was the answer she made.  “I have come to stay, Rosy.  We can make things right if they require it.  Why not?”

Lady Anstruthers started a little, and stared at her.  She knew ten thousand reasons why things had not been made right, and the casual inference that such reasons could be lightly swept away as if by the mere wave of a hand, implied a power appertaining to a time seeming so lost forever that it was too much for her.

“Oh, Betty, Betty!” she cried, “you talk as if—­you are so——!”

The fact, so simple to the members of the abnormal class to which she of a truth belonged, the class which heaped up its millions, the absolute knowledge that there was a great deal of money in the world and that she was of those who were among its chief owners, had ceased to seem a fact, and had vanished into the region of fairy stories.

That she could not believe it a reality revealed itself to Bettina, as by a flash, which was also a revelation of many things.  There would be unpleasing truths to be learned, and she had not made her pilgrimage for nothing.  But—­in any event—­there were advantages without doubt in the circumstance which subjected one to being perpetually pointed out as a daughter of a multi-millionaire.  As this argued itself out for her with rapid lucidity, she bent and kissed Rosy once more.  She even tried to do it lightly, and not to allow the rush of love and pity in her soul to betray her.

“I talk as if—­as if I were Betty,” she said.  “You have forgotten.  I have not.  I have been looking forward to this for years.  I have been planning to come to you since I was eleven years old.  And here we sit.”

“You didn’t forget?  You didn’t?” faltered the poor wreck of Rosy.  “Oh!  Oh!  I thought you had all forgotten me—­quite—­quite!”

And her face went down in her spare, small hands, and she began to cry again.

CHAPTER XII

UGHTRED

Bettina stood alone in her bedroom a couple of hours later.  Lady Anstruthers had taken her to it, preparing her for its limitations by explaining that she would find it quite different from her room in New York.  She had been pathetically nervous and flushed about it, and Bettina had also been aware that the apartment itself had been hastily, and with much moving of objects from one chamber to another, made ready for her.