Now the outlook seemed even more hopeless, bereft of the star of her great hope. The ambition to be an author had been a part of her so long, that it seemed even more indispensable than her eye-sight.
The slow hot tears began to drop down on her pillow after awhile, tears of mortification as well as disappointment. The girls would have to know. She had been foolish to make such a parade of her attempt. She should have waited. But then she had been so sure that her story was a good one. That was the hardest part to bear, that she had been so mistaken. It would have been easier, she thought bitterly, if her rebuffs had come earlier; if some of her first contributions had been returned. But the way had been made so easy for her. Her very first poems had been accepted, printed, praised. Everybody had predicted success, everybody expected great things of her, even old Bishop Chartley. The girls at school had openly proclaimed her as a genius, the teachers had praised every effort and urged her to greater, the whole Valley looked upon her as one set apart by a special gift.
Was it any wonder, she asked herself, that she had come to believe in her own ability. It was as if she had been urged down a flowery path by each one she met, to find that every guide was mistaken, and that the way they pointed out ended in a dismal slough of disappointment.
Presently she heard Wardo's little feet on the stairs, pattering up to bed, and his voice raised in his ceaseless questioning; then a little later Lloyd's voice singing him to sleep. After that there was the sound below of people coming and going, Leland Harcourt's laugh and the scrape of wheels on the gravelled drive.
She felt a dull throb of gratitude that the family left her alone.
A long time after she heard the closing and locking of doors, and then steps again on the stairs. Some one stopped outside her door.
"Good-night, Betty deah."
"Good-night," she answered in a voice which she tried to keep steady, but there was a sob in it, and divining that the kindest thing would be not to notice it, Lloyd choked back the word of sympathy she longed to speak, and went on to her room.
Nearly an hour after Betty got up, and lighting her lamp, sat down at the desk where the rejected manuscript lay. Turning it over listlessly, she read a paragraph here and there, trying to see it through the eyes of the publisher who had returned it. If he had sent merely a printed notice of refusal, such as she had been told was customary, stating impersonally that it was returned with regret because unavailable, she would have started it off again at daybreak to another place, knowing that what does not fill the special need of one firm may be seized with alacrity by another. But this man had taken the trouble to explain why it was unavailable.