“I know how they come here and marry,” she said.  “The new Duchess of Downes is an American.  She had a fortune of two million pounds.”

“If she chooses to rebuild a great house and a great name,” said Betty, lifting her shoulders lightly, “why not—­if it is an honest bargain?  I suppose it is part of the building of the bridge.”

Little Lady Anstruthers, trying to pull up the sleeves of the gauzy bodice slipping off her small, sharp bones, stared at her half in wondering adoration, half in alarm.

“Betty—­you—­you are so handsome—­and so clever and strange,” she fluttered.  “Oh, Betty, stand up so that I can see how tall and handsome you are!”

Betty did as she was told, and upon her feet she was a young woman of long lines, and fine curves so inspiring to behold that Lady Anstruthers clasped her hands together on her knees in an excited gesture.

“Oh, yes!  Oh, yes!” she cried.  “You are just as wonderful as you looked when I turned and saw you under the trees.  You almost make me afraid.”

“Because I am wonderful?” said Betty.  “Then I will not be wonderful any more.”

“It is not because I think you wonderful, but because other people will.  Would you rebuild a great house?” hesitatingly.

The fine line of Betty’s black brows drew itself slightly together.

“No,” she said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

“How could the man who owned it persuade me that he was in earnest if he said he loved me?  How could I persuade him that I was worth caring for and not a mere ambitious fool?  There would be too much against us.”

“Against you?” repeated Lady Anstruthers.

“I don’t say I am fair,” said Betty.  “People who are proud are often not fair.  But we should both of us have seen and known too much.”

“You have seen me now,” said Lady Anstruthers in her listless voice, and at the same moment dinner was announced and she got up from the sofa, so that, luckily, there was no time for the impersonal answer it would have been difficult to invent at a moment’s notice.  As they went into the dining-room Betty was thinking restlessly.  She remembered all the material she had collected during her education in France and Germany, and there was added to it the fact that she had seen Rosy, and having her before her eyes she felt that there was small prospect of her contemplating the rebuilding of any great house requiring reconstruction.

There was fine panelling in the dining-room and a great fireplace and a few family portraits.  The service upon the table was shabby and the dinner was not a bounteous meal.  Lady Anstruthers in her girlish, gauzy dress and looking too small for her big, high-backed chair tried to talk rapidly, and every few minutes forgot herself and sank into silence, with her eyes unconsciously fixed upon her sister’s face.  Ughtred watched Betty also, and with a hungry questioning.  The man-servant in the worn