"Give Service?" Well, perhaps some day in ways she could not now imagine, she might be able to return a small measure of the service that her friends had been so generously bestowing upon her.
"Pursue Knowledge, Be Trustworthy." No misfortune need separate a girl from these ideals.
"Hold on to Health." This might mean a harder fight than she had ever yet had to make before, but Betty felt a new courage faintly struggling within her.
"Glorify Work." That was not an impossible demand of her as a Torch Bearer among her group of Camp Fire girls. It was the last of the seven points of their great law that she dreaded to face at this moment, here in the darkness alone.
"Be Happy." Could she ever again be happy even for a day or an hour? And yet the law said: "If we have pain, to hide it, if others have sorrow, be quick to relieve it."
But what the rest of the law read she could not now recall. For Herr Crippen was beginning to play one of the most exquisite pieces of music that can ever be rendered on the violin, Schubert's Serenade.
"Last night the nightingale woke me,
Last night when all was still
It sang in the golden moonlight"
Betty wondered why the music should sound so strangely far away, as though she were dreaming and it were coming to her somewhere out of the land of dreams.
Another moment and Betty was sound asleep. Nevertheless the Professor, with his eyes still upon her, played softly on, played until Mrs. Ashton noiselessly entered the room.
Then he ceased and the man and woman, standing one on either side of Betty's bed, looked at each other with expressions it would be difficult to translate. For each face held a certain amount of pleading and of defiance.