"Wait!" she said, and before any one could have stopped her she was skimming half-way across the garden to the house. Jim Frobisher wondered whether Hanaud had meant to stop her and then had given up the idea as quite out of the question. Certainly he had made some small quick movement; and even now, he watched Betty's flight across the broad lawn between the roses with an inscrutable queer look.
"To run like that!" he said to Frobisher, "with a boy's nimbleness and a girl's grace! It is pretty, eh? The long slim legs that twinkle, the body that floats!" and Betty ran up the stone steps into the house.
There was a tension in Hanaud's attitude with which his light words did not agree, and he watched the blank windows of the house with expectancy. Betty, however, was hardly a minute upon her errand. She reappeared upon the steps with a largish envelope in her hand and quickly rejoined the group.
"Monsieur, we have tried to keep this back from you," she said, without bitterness but with a deep regret. "I yesterday, Ann to-day, just as we have tried for many years to keep it from all Dijon. But there is no help for it now."
She opened the envelope and, taking out a cabinet photograph, handed it to Hanaud.
"This is the portrait of Madame, my aunt, at the time of her marriage with my uncle."
It was the three-quarter length portrait of a woman, slender with the straight carriage of youth, in whose face a look of character had replaced youth's prettiness. It was a face made spiritual by suffering, the eyes shadowed and wistful, the mouth tender, and conveying even in the hard medium of a photograph some whimsical sense of humour. It made Jim Frobisher, gazing over Hanaud's shoulder, exclaim not "She was beautiful," but "I would like to have known her."
"Yes! A companion," Hanaud added.
Betty took a second photograph from the envelope.
"But this, Monsieur, is the same lady a year ago."