"Well, Colonel, I may as well make a clean breast of it. I have come this morning to ask you----"
At this, Betty suddenly dropped her needlework and scurried frantically out of the room.
Fortescue and the Colonel talked a long time together.
"I surmise what your disagreement and my granddaughter's was about," said the Colonel. "I think you both did me an injustice in supposing that I would stand in the way of the child's happiness."
Then Fortescue told about his trouble with his eyes, and his chances of remaining in the army, and all the details with which the Colonel was so familiar and so sympathetic.
It was quite twelve o'clock before Betty and her lover had their next walk up and down the garden path behind the tall box hedge.
Fortescue's arrival had very much puzzled Kettle, and he asked Aunt Tulip what it meant.
"Huh!" sniffed Aunt Tulip. "It means that Mr. Fortescue is jes' dead stuck on Miss Betty, an' Miss Betty, she kinder got a shine fur Mr. Fortescue."
Kettle determined to satisfy himself, and, watching his chance, when Betty had returned to the Colonel in the sitting-room, marched in and planting himself before Betty, asked anxiously:
"Miss Betty, is Mr. Fortescue dead stuck on you, an' is you got a kinder shine fur Mr. Fortescue?"
"What do you mean, you impudent boy?" screamed Betty, red and furious, while the Colonel laughed. "How dare you ask such things? I have a great mind to give you a good slap."
"Hi, Miss Betty, Aunt Tulip, she tole me so," replied Kettle, deeply injured. "An' I jes' thought I'd arsk you."
Betty could not help laughing, and when Fortescue came for his afternoon visit--for two visits a day were the least he could get along with, so he swore--Betty told him of Kettle's iniquity. Instead of denouncing Kettle, Fortescue laughed uproariously, and, calling the boy out of the kitchen, where he was peeling potatoes for Aunt Tulip, handed him what Kettle described as "a whole round silver dollar," and said, still laughing:
"Kettle, I am dead stuck on Miss Betty, and she has got a kind of a shine for me."
"There, now, Miss Betty," said the aggrieved Kettle. "An' you was a-gwine ter slap me fur axin' you!"
After a week or two, Fortescue mustered up courage to ask the Colonel, since he had said that he would not stand in the way of Betty's happiness, if Betty and himself could be married, and, if so, would the Colonel come to Rosehill to live for the present. The Colonel shook his head.