The girl raised her head. The man was gazing straight into the fire. All the eager light that had made his face seem young had gone, and he looked worn and tired. Bettina had no worldly intuitions to teach her the reason for the change a woman's name had wrought, and so absorbed was she in her own trouble that she viewed the transformation with unseeing eyes.
"What could she do if she were here?" she asked with childish directness.
"She would find some way out of it—she is very wise." He spoke with some hesitation, as a man speaks who holds a subject sacred. "She has had to decide things for herself all her life—her father and mother died when she was a little girl; now she is over thirty and the mistress of a large fortune. She spends her winters in the city and her summers down here by the sea—but for the past two years she has been staying in Europe with a widowed friend who was a schoolmate of hers in Berlin."
"When is she coming back?"
Out of a long silence, he answered, "I am not sure that she will come back. Her engagement was announced last fall—to a German, Ulric Van Rosen—she is to be married in June."
The fact, to him so pregnant of woeful possibilities, meant little to Bettina.
"Of course if she's not here, she can't do anything—and anyhow most people don't care to do practical things to help, do they?"
She looked so childish, so appealing, so altogether exquisite and young in her black-robed slenderness, that he answered her as he would have answered a child.
"It's too bad that the world should hurt you."
"But I'm going to do wonderful things in the city."