Tom’s words still rankled.  Betty’s temper flared up belligerently as she recalled them.  He had evidently meant to insinuate that Charley had lied outright when he told her the motive for the attack, and he had followed it up by that covert slur on his character.  Charley’s devotion was the thing that redeemed the dull monotony of existence.  She became suddenly humble and tenderly penitent in her mood toward him; he loved her much better than she deserved, and she suspected that her own attitude had been habitually ungenerous and selfish.  She had accepted all and yielded nothing.  She wondered gravely why it was she did not love him; she was fond of him—­she was very, very fond of him; she wondered if after all, as he said, this were not the beginning of love, the beginning of that deeper feeling which she was not sure she understood, not sure she should ever experience.

The thought of Charley’s unwavering affection gave her a great sense of peace; it was something to have inspired such devotion, she could never be quite desperate while she had him.  She must try to make him understand how possible an ideal friendship was between them, how utterly impossible anything else.  She would like to have seen Charley happily married to some nice girl—­ “I wonder whom!” thought Betty, gazing deep into the night through her drooping lashes.  She considered possible candidates for the happiness she herself seemed so willing to forego, but for one reason or another dismissed them all.  “I am not sure I should care to see him marry,” she confessed under her breath.  “It would spoil everything.  Men are much nicer than girls!” And Charley possessed distinguished merits as a man; he was not to be too hastily disposed of, even for his own good.  She viewed him in his various aspects, his character and disposition came under her critical survey.  Nature had given the young planter a handsome presence; wealth and position had come to him as fortuitously.  The first of these was no great matter, perhaps; Betty herself was sometimes burdened with a sense of possession, but family was indispensable.

In theory, at least, she was a thoroughgoing little aristocrat.  A gentleman was always a gentleman.  There were exceptions, like Tom, to be sure, but even Tom could have reached up and seized the title had he coveted it.  She rarely forgot that she was the mistress of Belle Plain and a Malroy.  Just wherein a Malroy differed from the rest of the sons of men she had never paused to consider, it sufficed that there was a hazy Malroy genealogy that went back to tidewater Virginia, and then if one were not meanly curious, and would skip a generation or two that could not be accounted for in ways any Malroy would accept, one might triumphantly follow the family to a red-roofed Sussex manor house.  Altogether, it was a highly satisfactory genealogy and it had Betty’s entire faith.  The Nortons were every bit as good as the Malroys, which was saying a great deal.  Their history was quite as pretentious, quite as vague, and as hopelessly involved in the mists of tradition.