So Vere went away, but Ned was far too loyal to his grandfather to ever think of appealing to an unknown father against him. Nevertheless, now that Vere's departure had broken off all his connection with Haslem Towers, he began to feel that life at Liddon was very dull. He saw Bee sometimes when she rode out with Betty; she was growing up into a tall girl, but she still smiled at him with a child's frank friendship. Betty decidedly refused to forbid this very slight intercourse, when Sir John grumbled at it, so he said no more, for Bee had grown very dear to him. He was content to give her her own way in calling herself by her father's name, but he was resolved that some day she should marry her cousin, Vere, and be mistress of Haslem Towers. Her refinement of spirit and high courage, he thought, might save the unhappy boy, who in the temptations of an idle garrison life was showing many signs of moral and mental weakness; Sir John refused to believe the worst. "Boys will be boys," he said impatiently to Betty. "Of course I'll pay his debts again, and ask no questions; if he sows all his wild oats now, he'll make all the better husband for our little maid later. She'll steady him fast enough, never fear--Bee Goode, as the minx insists on calling herself, not bad, eh! She shall be his wife on the day he is twenty-one, and she will be seventeen." Betty felt a womanly reluctance to think of Bee thus sacrificed, yet she went on helping to train Bee in the ignorance of life that should make her unable to resist when those she loved and trusted pushed her skilfully into marriage. Betty, though a good woman, was warped by the artificial world in which she lived; she knew that Bee's parents had left her nothing; her brother, Eli, five years older, was with relatives in Boston, but Bee, when seven, had been adopted by the Edgars, who had given her up unwillingly to Sir John. Betty could not imagine any lot for a girl but marriage; and surely, she honestly believed, luxury in England, even with the lowest of husbands, was better than exile in some howling wilderness. Bee had not forgotten her American brother, or her Canadian friends, but she never heard from either, and she believed Sir John when he blamed French privateers for the destruction of the Atlantic mail. She still wrote sometimes, but as none of her letters went overseas, her friends there naturally thought she had forgotten them in English luxury. Vere, who knew his grandfather's plan, hated Bee with all his mean little soul, but never dreamed of refusing to obey; and Bee, who had not the faintest idea that she was destined by her kin to be her cousin's wife, still despised him. Conditions of thought round her, however, were gradually bringing her to feel that it was the bounden duty of the relatives of the heir of Haslem Towers to make any sacrifice to save him.