What Betty gathered was that, after the long and terrible illness which had followed Ughtred’s birth, she had risen from what had been so nearly her deathbed, prostrated in both mind and body.  Ughtred did not know all that he revealed when he touched upon the time which he said his mother could not quite remember—­when she had sat for months staring vacantly out of her window, trying to recall something terrible which had happened, and which she wanted to tell her mother, if the day ever came when she could write to her again.  She had never remembered clearly the details of the thing she had wanted to tell, and Nigel had insisted that her fancy was part of her past delirium.  He had said that at the beginning of her delirium she had attacked and insulted his mother and himself but they had excused her because they realised afterwards what the cause of her excitement had been.  For a long time she had been too brokenly weak to question or disbelieve, but, later she had vaguely known that he had been lying to her, though she could not refute what he said.  She recalled, in course of time, a horrible scene in which all three of them had raved at each other, and she herself had shrieked and laughed and hurled wild words at Nigel, and he had struck her.  That she knew and never forgot.  She had been ill a year, her hair had fallen out, her skin had faded and she had begun to feel like a nervous, tired old woman instead of a girl.  Girlhood, with all the past, had become unreal and too far away to be more than a dream.  Nothing had remained real but Stornham and Nigel and the little hunchbacked baby.  She was glad when the Dowager died and when Nigel spent his time in London or on the Continent and left her with Ughtred.  When he said that he must spend her money on the estate, she had acquiesced without comment, because that insured his going away.  She saw that no improvement or repairs were made, but she could do nothing and was too listless to make the attempt.  She only wanted to be left alone with Ughtred, and she exhibited willpower only in defence of her child and in her obstinacy with regard to asking money of her father.

“She thought, somehow, that grandfather and grandmother did not care for her any more—­that they had forgotten her and only cared for you,” Ughtred explained.  “She used to talk to me about you.  She said you must be so clever and so handsome that no one could remember her.  Sometimes she cried and said she did not want any of you to see her again, because she was only a hideous, little, thin, yellow old woman.  When I was very little she told me stories about New York and Fifth Avenue.  I thought they were not real places—­I though they were places in fairyland.”

Betty patted his shoulder and looked away for a moment when he said this.  In her remote and helpless loneliness, to Rosy’s homesick, yearning soul, noisy, rattling New York, Fifth Avenue with its traffic and people, its brown-stone houses and ricketty stages, had seemed like that—­so splendid and bright and heart-filling, that she had painted them in colours which could belong only to fairyland.  It said so much.