“When was that?”
“When we landed at Shanghai.”
“Hardly three weeks ago. He's here now. Tell me—he wouldn't have gone off like that, of course, leaving such an intimate letter, unless a pretty definite situation had arisen.”
Betty was silent.
“Will you tell me what it was?”
“No.”
“Then—I really have a right to ask this of you—will you give me your word not to see him until your father returns, and then not until you have laid it before him?”
Silence again. The fringed lids fluttered. A small hand reached for the crimson fringe, slim fingers clung there.
Betty's thoughts were running away. She felt the situation now as a form of torture. That grim experienced woman must be partly right, of course; Betty was still so young as to defer mechanically to her elders, and she had no great opinion of herself, of her strength of character or her judgment. She thought of the boys at home, who had been fond of her. ... She thought of Harold Apgar, over there in Korea. He was clean, likable, prosperous; and he wanted to marry her. It really would solve her problems, could she only feel toward him so much as a faint reflection of the glow that Jonathan Brachey had aroused in her. But nothing in her nature answered Harold Apgar. For that matter—and this was the deeply confusing thing—she could not formulate her feeling for Brachey. She couldn't admit that she loved him. The thought of giving her life into his keeping—one day, should he come to her with clean hands; should he ask—was not to be entertained at all. But she couldn't think of him without excitement; and that excitement, last night and to-day, was the dominant fact in her life. She had no plans in which he figured. She was vaguely bent on forgetting him. During the night she had regretted her promise to meet him once more alone. Yet she had given that promise. Given the same situation she would—she knew with a touch of bewilderment that this was so—promise again.
Betty looked appealingly at Mr. Boatwright. Then, meeting with no sympathy, she drew up her little figure.