“Yes, I’ll remember my promise,” she answered gaily. “I am very, very much obliged to you,” and she held out her hand. He took it in his. What a cold, slender, little hand! It gave him a grateful, cordial shake, like a hearty schoolboy, and in another second its proprietor had disappeared in the deepening dusk. And so that was Betty! who came into a room like a blast of wind, according to Major Malone, and whom his mother had called “a beautiful, warm-hearted, young creature.” Well, on the whole, he rather liked her. CHAPTER VIII. MISS DOPPING TO THE RESCUE. “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse.” “Miss Dopping’s cold had taken a terrible strong hold of her,” according to the maid who issued bulletins at her hall door, and she sat cowering over the fire in what she called her “museum,” wrapped in a woollen shawl, munching liquorice ball, and reminding herself that she was seventy-five years of age, and could not expect to live for ever! Each afternoon Betty had appeared, escorted by her dogs, all brisk and cheerful, and, whilst Brown ate biscuits, and Jones conscientiously drew the room for mice, Betty read aloud, wound worsted, answered letters, and amused her; but to-day, thanks to Jones’s misadventure, there was no Betty, and the old lady was feeling unusually low and forlorn. Her drawing-room (or museum) was a strange apartment for an elderly spinster. If you were told that it was the sanctum of a sporting squire, you would not have been surprised, for it was essentially a man’s room, from the tanned skins of defunct hunters spread about the floor, the walls covered with brushes, horse shoes, and sporting prints (prints setting forth slender-waisted riders, charging impossible rails on short-tailed thoroughbreds, or spanking coaches-and-four, or flat races) to the venerable old fox-hound, dozing on the rug.