A half-hour went by; neither Betty nor Fortescue could have told what passed, except that there were clinging kisses, and whispered pleas for forgiveness, and tender promises. They were so quiet and low-voiced that the blue pigeons which nested in the pigeon-house close by the hedge fluttered around them, looking at them, and making little cooing sounds as they stopped close to them on the brown earth. At last the tension of emotion subsided a little, and Betty made Fortescue tell her all the details of his trouble. His case was peculiar. There was not much obvious injury to his eyes, so the doctors said, only he could not see very well. But that was enough. He hoped that in a year or two, perhaps, with country air and rest and quiet, a cure might be worked. Betty, with all her old confidence, and smiling bravely, declared he could get well, he should get well, he must get well. They stayed out until the sunset glow was past and the purple dusk had come. Then it was Betty who sent Fortescue home. "I can't ask you to stay to supper," she said, "because I want first to tell Grandfather that we have made up. Haven't we made up?" Fortescue's answer was a true lover's answer. "We have made up," he said, "and as you know right from wrong better than I do, I mean to do what you think best, Betty, if we have to be engaged for thirty-four years, until I shall be retired, even if I get my eyesight back." "Very well," answered Betty, with a wicked smile. "Let us see how long you will remain in that virtuous frame of mind." CHAPTER XXII GLORIA While Fortescue was walking across the brown stubble of the fields to Rosehill, Betty, in the firelit sitting-room, was telling the Colonel all about it. "And you must not worry, Grandfather, about my leaving you," she said, "because Jack has said that he will leave all that to me, and we can find a way, depend upon it." The Colonel thought that he knew a way, a very easy and good way, by which most problems are finally solved, but he did not speak of this to Betty. He only said: "Whatever you do, my dear, will make me satisfied." The next morning Fortescue appeared, and looked much more like his old cheerful self than he had the day before. Betty blushed up to her eyes when Fortescue said smiling, to the Colonel: "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.