“All right,” said Betty, and though she smiled at him through her hair, her smile was not so bright as it had been. It was all very well to hear Virginia praised, she told herself, but she should have liked it better had Dan been a little less emphatic. “I don't think any one is going to run off with her,” she added gravely, and let the subject of her sister's beauty pass.
But at the end of the week, when Dan went back to college, her loyal heart reproached her, and she confided to Virginia that “he thought her a great deal lovelier than Great-aunt Emmeline.”
“Really?” asked Virginia, and determined to be very nice to him when he came home for the holidays.
“But what does he say about you?” she inquired after a moment.
“About me?” returned Betty. “Oh, he doesn't say anything about me, except that I am kind.”
Virginia stooped and kissed her. “You are kind, dear,” she said in her sweetest voice.
And “kind,” after all, was the word for Betty, unless Big Abel had found one when he said, “She is des all heart.” It was Betty who had tramped three miles through the snow last Christmas to carry her gifts to the free negro Levi, who was “laid up” and could not come to claim his share; and it was Betty who had asked as a present for herself the lame boy Micah, that belonged to old Rainy-day Jones. She had met Micah in the road, and from that day the Governor's life was a burden until he sent the negro up to her door on Christmas morning. There was never a sick slave or a homeless dog that she would not fly out to welcome, bareheaded and a little breathless, with the kindness brimming over from her eyes. “She has her father's head and her mother's heart,” said the Major to his wife, when he saw the girl going by with the dogs leaping round her and a young fox in her arms. “What a wife she would make for Dan when she grows up! I wish he'd fancy her. They'd be well suited, eh, Molly?”
“If he fancies the thing that is suited to him, he is less of a man than I take him to be,” retorted Mrs. Lightfoot, with a cynicism which confounded the Major. “He will lose his head over her doll baby of a sister, I suppose—not that she isn't a good girl,” she added briskly. “Julia Ambler couldn't have had a bad child if she had tried, though I confess I am surprised that she could have helped having a silly one; but Betty, why, there hasn't been a girl since I grew up with so much sense in her head as Betty Ambler has in her little finger.”
“When I think of you fifty years ago, I must admit that you put a high standard, Molly,” interposed the Major, who was always polite when he was not angry.
“She spent a week with me while you were away,” Mrs. Lightfoot went on in an unchanged voice, though with a softened face, “and, I declare, she kept house as well as I could have done it myself, and Cupid says she washed the pink teaset every morning with her own hands, and she actually cured Rhody's lameness with a liniment she made out of Jimson weed. I tell you now, Mr. Lightfoot, that, if I get sick, Betty Ambler is the only girl I'm going to have inside the house.”