"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:
"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."
"I don't care for any, thank you," said Betty, her heart far away from sweet potatoes with sugar and butter.
Kettle paused for a minute in order to think of some other inducement.
"Aunt Tulip, she got a rice pudden' wid gre't big raisins in it, mos' as big as my fist," urged Kettle.
But Kettle's sympathy could not be bottled up.
"Miss Betty," pleaded Kettle, "lemme go out an' crack you up some wun'nuts," by which Kettle meant walnuts.
"No, Kettle," she said sharply. "I don't want anything except tea and toast, as I told you."