There are no Dark Ages more impenetrable than those that lie immediately behind. They may put on an air of the explained and the familiar; they are a mystery for ever and for ever sealed. The young are secretly perplexed when the great words are used about the immediate past. They hear of Love and Joy, and when they see the issue, stand appalled. The idea that my mother could have felt, even about my own father, as I felt about---- No! I looked at her lying on the sofa with her eyes raised, and that air, anxious, intent, of the eavesdropper overhearing ill. So, then, one could have had all that love, and live to wear a look like this. I held fast to such reassurance as I could recall. I remembered how, when we were younger, the mere tone of voice in which she said "your father" had seemed to bring back the warmth of that old Happiness, the lamp of that old Safety which had lit the happy time. Out of those far-off days, so momentous for Bettina and me--days which our mother must recall so vividly, and which I saw, now, I should never have the key to--there nevertheless had come to me, as come to other children, an echo of the music that had fallen silent; dim apprehensions of the beauty of life to those two lovers in the gorgeous East; and out of starlit Indian nights, "hot and scented," came vague wafts of bygone sweetness that moved me to the verge of tears. For it was all ended. The strange thing was that, if she had never known that happiness, I should have felt less sorry for my mother now; less uneasy, in a way, at the Janus-face which life could hide until some unexpected hour. Perhaps to a good many young people comes this haunting sense of the sadness of life to older people. Especially when I thought of Eric I felt sharp pity for the race of older women--that grey majority for whom the Great Radiance had faded little by little; or those like my mother, out of whose hand the torch had been struck sharply and the darkness swallowed. She very seldom touched the piano at this time; but often, when I was with her, that old feeling, which belonged to the evenings when she sang to herself, came back to me; a feeling of overwhelming sadness--and a fear. Not even my secret could console me at such moments. Eric will never come back, I said to myself; or he will come back with a wife. And, with that start I had learned from my mother--where was Betty? She was late. She was very late. Unaccountably, alarmingly late. CHAPTER XIV WHERE IS BETTINA? She had come running in a little after six o'clock to ask if we mightn't, both of us, go and dine with Hermione. I said I didn't see why Bettina shouldn't go, but we could not ask till my mother was awake; she had been having broken nights, and had just fallen asleep. So Bettina waited--nearly half an hour; still my mother slept. Then Bettina went away softly and dressed, "so as to be ready, in case." She came back in her white frock, and still the sleeper had not waked nor stirred.