Betty considered 'No,' and rejected it, perhaps because the direct eyes seemed no longer to hold everything back; perhaps because, like a child hurt and bewildered, she wanted help; perhaps because, from the first to the last, she had always so liked Prudence Varley. She said 'Yes,' and came forward and cleared a space in her own chair, and sat down herself on the arm of Tommy's. The clearing of Tommy's would have been too arduous a task. Prudence sat down simply, unembarrassed. But Betty's thin, childish fingers, clasped round her knee, worked nervously in and out; she clenched her teeth over her lower lip. 'How is your brother?' Prudence said. 'B-better. He talked to-day, quite a lot.' That extremely probable fact, Prudence perhaps thought, could hardly be taken as conclusive proof of the Crevequers' good health. But she said: 'I am very glad. Then he may be up before very long, perhaps?' 'I don't know how long; they c-can't tell me.' Betty stammered a good deal over it. She paused for recovery. 'When he's well enough,' she resumed, 'we want to go north for a rest.' 'To England?' 'No. Oh no; that w-wouldn't be a rest. To Santa Caterina. It's our home; we used to live there.... Tommy won't be able to do much for some time.' 'No; of course. You won't come back till the autumn, when it's cooler, I expect.' The two looks met, the one faintly questioning and half asking pardon for the question, the other with all its depth of sad bewilderment stirred--a miserable gaze like a child's. 'I don't know,' said Betty, and bit her lip. Then quite suddenly the depths surged up and broke through. Her sad eyes hung on the lucid grey ones that looked with such gentleness at her. 'I don't know--oh, I don't know.... I don't know what we can do ... how we're to do it.... Can't you tell me?... Because it's been you, you know, who've spoilt things.... And what next?' Prudence accepted it, meeting the claim with puckered brows of thought. She did not know what next. She was an idealist, of a continual and never-failing hope; but, striving to see, she saw only roads running eternally sundered, as Betty too had seen them from the first hour of comprehension. Betty said again, half to herself, how they were spoilt, the old things. 'And what new things can there be, ever, for us?' On Prudence, who had done her share of the spoiling, she still made her stammering claim, blind-eyed, without hope. Prudence's response to it was a doubting question. 'If they're spoilt then ... you'll leave them?' Betty's eyes hung on hers. 'You mean not come back here? Oh, we don't want to; I've told you that's spoilt. But where else?... Tommy couldn't get anything to do at Santa Caterina.' Prudence said there were other places in Italy for a journalist. Or perhaps even England.... But at that Betty shook her head. No spoilt things should drive her to that place of damp half-lights.