In any case Bettina never wanted to stay indoors. So she would escape, and run about the garden, singing. My mother made us wheel her bed to the window that she might look out. She would lie there, watching Bettina play at church-choir with all our dolls in a row, and tiny home-made hymn-books in their laps. When a butterfly detached the leader of the choir, and Bettina went in chase to the other side of the garden, my mother would say anxiously: "Someone must go down and bring Bettina back." I could not bear to see Loring, or Melanie, doing anything for my mother. I think they humoured me, and that Melanie performed her service chiefly by stealth. I know I felt it to be all my doing when the invalid was able to come downstairs. She sat very near the fire though the day was hot. When she held up her hand to shade her eyes, her hand was different. Not only thin. Different. * * * * * Bettina and I were sorry she would never see the one or two kind people who "called to inquire." We had come early to know that her refusal to take any part in such meagre "life" as the scattered community offered was indeed founded upon "indisposition," as we had heard; but an indisposition deeper than her malady. We never knew her to say: these card-playing, fox-hunting people are our inferiors. But she might as well. We read her thought. When the Marley children went by on ponies, when the Reuters bought their third motor-car, Bettina and I stifled longing and curiosity with the puerilities of infant arrogance: Our mother doesn't mean to return your visit. She doesn't want us to 'sociate with your children. In our hearts we longed for the society specially of Dora Marley. Betty used to slip out and show Alexandra to Dora. Alexandra was Betty's most glorious doll. When the others couldn't find Betty I knew where to look. I went secretly, a roundabout way through the shrubberies, to bring Betty in, reluctant and looking back at Dora: "Come again to-morrow?" One day Dora shook her head. "Why not?" She was going back to school. "Aren't _you_ going back to school?" she asked. "Oh, no," I said, "we don't go to school." Dora seemed not only surprised, but inclined to pity us. "You _like_ having to go to school!" I said. She loved it. "So would you." "I should hate it!" I said with a passion of conviction. She couldn't think why. Neither could I--beyond the fact that my mother couldn't go with me. And that she had said of the Marley children, with that high air of pity--"They have the manners of girls who have not been brought up at home." Dora asked if we didn't hate our governess. She was still more mystified to hear we had never had one.