The very next day Ranny Dallas went away to shoot somewhere in the North.  
Bettina did not hide from me how unhappy she was.
 
"Perhaps he will write," I said.
 
"He isn't the sort that writes—not even when he's friends with a person." Then, with a rather miserable¹ laugh, Betty added: "He says he can't spell."
 
So I gathered that she had asked him to try.
 
And I gathered, too, that Hermione made light of the disagreement at the ball. She predicted that he'd be wanting to come back in a week or two, and Betty would find he had forgotten about the Battle of the Boyne.
 
We all came tacitly to agree that was precisely² what would happen—all, that is, except my mother, who knew nothing about the matter.
 
It was a somewhat subdued³ Bettina who began that year; but I don't think it was in the Bettina of those days to be unhappy long.[Pg 109]
 
(Oh, Bettina! how is it now?)
 
I don't know how anyone so loved and cherished could have gone on being actively⁴ unhappy. Besides, though the weeks went by and still Ranny did not reappear, there was a family reason to account for that. His father was very ill. Ranny's place was at home.
 
Hermione often gave us news of him that came through friends they had in common. And she spoke⁵ as though any week-end that found his father better, Ranny might motor down.
 
So we waited.
 
Bettina was a great deal with the Helmstone girls and their friends.
 
As for me, I was a great deal with my books in the copse. February, that year, was more like April, and all the violets and primroses⁶ rejoiced prematurely⁷.
 
I, too.
 
I was extraordinarily⁸ happy. For I was sure I was finding a way out of all our difficulties. A glorious way. A way Eric would applaud and love me for finding—all alone like this.
 
I had a recurring⁹ struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I had been "good"[Pg 110] and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the Great Secret.
 
My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright¹⁰ if I thought the increasing intimacy¹¹ was likely to do Bettina harm.
 
My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to Betty?
 
"The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?"
 
"Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly¹². "Clothes, and people and dogs."
 
"Oh, as for dogs!—--" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they discuss?"[Pg 111]
 
"Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say."
 
She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance."
 
When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as though she might be feeling "out of things."
 
Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late."
 
"Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself."
 
At that, of course, conscience pricked¹³ the more. "Anyhow, I have been away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is the one they chiefly want."
 
She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know."
 
As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of the difficulty of confidence on our part—of[Pg 112] how our very devotion and craving¹⁴ for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her know about Ranny."
 
"Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!"
 
I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did she feel so?
 
Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could tell her about myself.
 
"What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me."
 
"Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell."
 
And the sad part of it was that, after that, Betty began to be reserved with me too.
 
I was so afraid of the effect of our secretiveness on my mother that I learned how to interest her in people neither Betty nor I were the least interested in. I saved up stories and "characteristics"[Pg 113] to tell. The very success of these small efforts gave me secretly a sense of the emptiness of her life. To have nothing to think about but a couple of girls!—girls who were thinking all the while about things their mother didn't know. I could have cried out at the dreadfulness of such a fate. I felt it uneasily as a menace. Could she, when she was in her teens, have felt the least as I did? Oh, impossible! And yet....
 
"Tell me about when you were young," I said; but with the new insistence¹⁵, now, of one bent¹⁶ on grasping the unexplained things in another's life, the better to understand the unexplained things in her own.
 
I could not make much of the few bony facts. Her father had had a small Government post, and she had told us before that when she was three she lost her mother. The only new fact to emerge was that she had not been happy at home. She tried to make out the reason was that she loved fields and gardens, and her father's pursuits kept them in the town. But try as I migh............