Lady Anstruthers, looking shy and awkward as she fingered an ornament on a small table, seemed singularly a part of her background.  Her evening dress, slipping off her thin shoulders, was as faded and out of date as her carpet.  It had once been delicately blue and gauzy, but its gauziness hung in crushed folds and its blue was almost grey.  It was also the dress of a girl, not that of a colourless, worn woman, and her consciousness of its unfitness showed in her small-featured face as she came forward.

“Do you—­recognise it, Betty?” she asked hesitatingly.  “It was one of my New York dresses.  I put it on because—­because——­” and her stammering ended helplessly.

“Because you wanted to remind me,” Betty said.  If she felt it easier to begin with an excuse she should be provided with one.

Perhaps but for this readiness to fall into any tone she chose to adopt Rosy might have endeavoured to carry her poor farce on, but as it was she suddenly gave it up.

“I put it on because I have no other,” she said.  “We never have visitors and I haven’t dressed for dinner for so long that I seem to have nothing left that is fit to wear.  I dragged this out because it was better than anything else.  It was pretty once——­” she gave a little laugh, “twelve years ago.  How long years seem!  Was I—­was I pretty, Betty—­twelve years ago?”

“Twelve years is not such a long time.”  Betty took her hand and drew her to a sofa.  “Let us sit down and talk about it.”

“There is nothing much to talk about.  This is it——­” taking in the room with a wave of her hand.  “I am it.  Ughtred is it.”

“Then let us talk about England,” was Bettina’s light skim over the thin ice.

A red spot grew on each of Lady Anstruthers’ cheek bones and made her faded eyes look intense.

“Let us talk about America,” her little birdclaw of a hand clinging feverishly.  “Is New York still—­still——­”

“It is still there,” Betty answered with one of the adorable smiles which showed a deep dimple near her lip.  “But it is much nearer England than it used to be.”

“Nearer!” The hand tightened as Rosy caught her breath.

Betty bent rather suddenly and kissed her.  It was the easiest way of hiding the look she knew had risen to her eyes.  She began to talk gaily, half laughingly.

“It is quite near,” she said.  “Don’t you realise it?  Americans swoop over here by thousands every year.  They come for business, they come for pleasure, they come for rest.  They cannot keep away.  They come to buy and sell—­pictures and books and luxuries and lands.  They come to give and take.  They are building a bridge from shore to shore of their work, and their thoughts, and their plannings, out of the lives and souls of them.  It will be a great bridge and great things will pass over it.”  She kissed the faded cheek again.  She wanted to sweep Rosy away from the dreariness of “it.”  Lady Anstruthers looked at her with faintly smiling eyes.  She did not follow all this quite readily, but she felt pleased and vaguely comforted.