“You may be quite satisfied, Grandfather,” she said. “All that has happened was my own act.”
Betty turned and went out of the room. Being Christmas time, and there being no household tasks awaiting her, no sewing to do, because she had planned that this Christmas time should be one of perfect leisure, that she might be free to entertain her great guest, First Love, there was nothing for her to do. She went aimlessly up to her room. Then, suddenly, she felt a sharp headache. Her mental suffering produced a physical pain. She was rather glad of it, as it gave her an excuse for keeping to her room and lying down. The little room was flooded with winter sunshine, and a pretty fire was smouldering on the hearth. Betty drew the curtains, glancing meanwhile toward Rosehill. Her keen eyes caught sight of Fortescue crossing the lawn rapidly. A great buzzard was wheeling majestically over the Rosehill house, and a group of the servants, one of the men with a gun, was standing on the edge of the lawn, prepared to fire at the bird. Fortescue walked up and, taking the gun, sighted and fired, and the buzzard fell upon the roof of the house. This little act wrung Betty’s heart.
“How little he cares!” she thought bitterly. “Any trifle can distract him. Well, it was better to find it out in time.”
Then, for the first time, Betty turned her eyes away as the Colonel turned his away from Rosehill. She loved the place, and deep in her heart had grown the wish to preside there once more, as Fortescue’s wife. It was impossible, quite impossible, now. She could not forget Fortescue—Betty was honest enough with herself to know that, and honorable enough to respect her own affection. Love is not killed in an hour or even a day. The great stretch of life ahead of her loomed before Betty’s eyes as one stands on the edge of a parched desert and thinks of the weary journey across it. For Betty Beverley, the coquette, was the soul of constancy. These thoughts and many others and a racking headache drove Betty to her bed. She threw herself on it, with all the sunshine shut out of her room, just as it had been shut suddenly out of her life.
At the midday dinner, Kettle, who had almost supplanted Uncle Cesar as butler, came up, and, opening Betty’s door and putting in his little woolly head, said softly:
“Miss Betty, dinner done ready.”
“I can’t come down to dinner,” answered Betty. “Tell the Colonel that I have a bad headache. It will be better to-night, and I am going to the party just the same. But when dinner is over, Kettle, you may bring me up some tea and toast.”
Kettle had never known Betty to have an ache or a pain since he had been established at Holly Lodge, and the sight of her pale face, and the weariness in her voice, frightened him. He began to argue with Betty:
“Miss Betty, you better come down ter dinner. Aunt Tulip, she done cook some of the bes’ sweet ’taters you ever see in your life, Miss Betty—got sugar on ’em, an’ butter too.”