Lying in a long chair reading one of her Tauchnitz books and smoking, Betty felt very manly indeed.
The long afternoon wore on. The trees of the garden crowded round Betty with soft whispers in a language not known of the trees on the boulevards.
"I am very very unhappy," said Betty with a deep sigh of delight.
She went in, unpacked, arranged everything neatly. She always arranged everything neatly, but nothing ever would stay arranged. She wrote to her father, explaining that Madame Gautier had brought her and the other girls to Grez for the summer, and she gave as her address:
Chez Madame Chevillon, Pavilion du Jardin, Grez.
"I shall be very very unhappy to-morrow," said Betty that night, laying her face against the coarse cool linen of her pillow; "to-day I have been stunned—-I haven't been able to feel anything. But to-morrow."
To-morrow, she knew, would be golden and green even as to-day. But she should not care. She did not want to be happy. How could she be happy now that she had of her own free will put away the love of her life? She called and beckoned to all the thoughts that the green world shut out, and they came at her call, fluttering black wings to hide the sights and sounds of field and wood and green garden, and making their nest in her heart.
"Yes," she said, turning the hot rough pillow, "now it begins to hurt again. I knew it would."
It hurt more than she had meant it to hurt, when she beckoned those black-winged thoughts. It hurt so much that she could not sleep. She got up and leaned from the window.
She wondered where Vernon was. It was quite early. Not eleven. Lady St. Craye had called that quite early.