As for me, I was a great deal with my books in the copse. February, that year, was more like April, and all the violets and primroses rejoiced prematurely. I, too. I was extraordinarily happy. For I was sure I was finding a way out of all our difficulties. A glorious way. A way Eric would applaud and love me for finding--all alone like this. I had a recurring struggle with myself not to write and tell him. When I had been "good" and wanted to give myself a treat, I allowed myself to go over in imagination that coming scene in which he should be told the Great Secret. * * * * * My mother sometimes spoke a little anxiously about Bettina's being so much with Hermione. She surprised me one day by asking me outright if I thought the increasing intimacy was likely to do Bettina harm. My feeling about it was too vague to produce. I could only suggest that if she was afraid of anything of the kind, why should she not speak to Betty? "The child has so few pleasures," was the answer, with that brooding look of tenderness which the thought of Betty often brought into my mother's face. "Does she tell you what they talk about?" "Oh, the usual things!" I answered discreetly. "Clothes, and people and dogs." "Oh, as for dogs!----" My mother dismissed the Chows. Bettina, in an unguarded moment, had admitted that she thought she could care for one dog. But she couldn't possibly care for eighteen. "What people do they discuss?" "Oh, pretty much everybody, I should say." She looked at me. "But some more than others. The Boynes, for instance." When I said I didn't think so, my mother seemed a little chilled, as though she might be feeling "out of things." Her face troubled me. "I am afraid," I said, "that you are thinking Betty and I have been leaving you a good deal alone of late." "Oh," she answered hastily, "I was not thinking about myself." At that, of course, conscience pricked the more. "Anyhow, _I_ have been away too much," I confessed. "And there's no excuse for me. For Betty is the one they chiefly want." She saw I was making resolutions. "I like you two to be together," she said. "Bettina needs you more than I. I should feel much less easy in my mind about Bettina if you weren't there to watch over her, and" (she added significantly) "to tell me anything I ought to know." As I look back, I pray that my mother did not feel we were growing away from her. But I cannot be sure some fine intuition did not visit her of the difficulty of confidence on our part--of how our very devotion and craving for her good opinion made Betty, for instance, shy of telling her things that a younger sister could easily tell to one near her own age. I knew my mother's view about the relations that should exist between mothers and daughters. I made up my mind to speak to Betty about it. So I asked her one night if she didn't think she ought to "let her know about Ranny." "Heavens, no! She is the last person I could tell!"