The little head seemed to droop lower, he could see the childish breast heaving under the pretty white apron. She dropped him a curtsey humbly.
"You are Betty!" he said. "And you called me——"
He paused.
"Oh sir, oh sir forgive me. Indeed—indeed I du not know what made me, sir!" Now the blue eyes were lifted to him in pitiful appeal.
"Indeed—oh indeed, sir, I didn't know what I were saying! 'Twasn't as if I myself spoke, 'twas as if—if summut in me made me say it—oh sir—indeed, I couldn't help it! I—I don't know what made me du it!"
How blue her eyes were, how they shone and glittered now with the tears that clung to the sweeping, upturned lashes, how pitiful in its appeal for pardon was the little face! He looked at her with a feeling of pity, and yet not of pity only. It was she! the girl of his dreams, the girl who had come to him and called him "Allan, her Allan," this girl a servant in the house, who had come to him this day in real life and had called him by his name.
What meaning, what strange, unknown, force was behind it all? How could he tell, still less, poor maid, how could she?
"I am not angry, Betty," he said, "indeed, why should I be angry—with you—for I called you Betty, knowing it to be your name, though I did not recognise you as Betty Hanson, my wife's maid. Don't think of it again, child, and do not let it trouble you! Perhaps you are right, it was not you yourself who spoke——"
"And you bain't angry wi' me, sir?" she asked.
He shook his head and smiled. Angry—angry with her—yet had she not once before asked him that selfsame question? Strangely he remembered clearly and distinctly the very words "Allan, Allan, be you still angry wi' your Betty now?"