"The rain came so suddenly that I couldn't get the window of my car closed; it's an awful storm. "And now," he said, when she had brought the tea on an old Sheffield tray, and had set it on a little folding table which he placed between them on the hearth, "and now let's talk about it." "Please don't try to make me stay----" "Why not?" "Because, oh, because you can't know what I suffer here; it isn't just because I've lost mother, but the people--they all know about her and about Dad, and they aren't nice to me." "My dear child!" "Perhaps it's because father was a singer and an Italian, and mother came of good old Puritan stock. They seem to think she lowered herself by marrying him. They can't understand that though he was unkind to her, he belonged to an aristocratic Venetian family----" "It's from those wonderful women of Venice, then, that you get that hair. Do you remember Browning's: "'Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.'" There was no response to his thought in her young eyes. "I've never read Browning," she said, negligently, "and I hate to think of 'dear dead women.' I want to think of live things, of bright things, of gay things. It seems sometimes as if I should die here among the shadows." She was sobbing now, with her head on the table. "Bettina," the doctor bent over her, "poor child, poor little child." "Please let me go," she whispered. "I can't keep you, of course. I wish I knew what to do. I wish Diana were here." "Diana?" "I forgot that you did not know her. She has been away for two years. She's rather wonderful, Bettina." The girl raised her head. The man was gazing straight into the fire. All the eager light that had made his face seem young had gone, and he looked worn and tired. Bettina had no worldly intuitions to teach her the reason for the change a woman's name had wrought, and so absorbed was she in her own trouble that she viewed the transformation with unseeing eyes. "What could she do if she were here?" she asked with childish directness. "She would find some way out of it--she is very wise." He spoke with some hesitation, as a man speaks who holds a subject sacred. "She has had to decide things for herself all her life--her father and mother died when she was a little girl; now she is over thirty and the mistress of a large fortune. She spends her winters in the city and her summers down here by the sea--but for the past two years she has been staying in Europe with a widowed friend who was a schoolmate of hers in Berlin." "When is she coming back?" Out of a long silence, he answered, "I am not sure that she will come back. Her engagement was announced last fall--to a German, Ulric Van Rosen--she is to be married in June." The fact, to him so pregnant of woeful possibilities, meant little to Bettina.