Colonel Kingsward was out of himself and he uttered words which terrified his daughter, and which need not be recorded against him--for he certainly did not in cold blood wish Bee to fall under any celestial malediction. He stormed about the room, saying much that Betty could not understand; that it was just the thing of all others that should not have happened, and the time of all others; that if it had been a little later, or even a little earlier, it would not have mattered; that it was enough to overturn every arrangement, increase every difficulty. He was not at all a man to give way to his feelings so. His children, indeed, until very lately, had never seen him excited at all, and it was an astonishment beyond description to little Betty to be a spectator of this scene. Indeed, Colonel Kingsward awoke presently to a sense of the self-exposure he had been making, and calmed down, or, at least, controlled himself, upon which Betty ventured to ask him very humbly what he thought she had better do. “May I go to Miss Lance and tell her? She is not angry now, nor unhappy about him like--like _us_,” said Betty, putting the best face upon it with instinctive capacity, “and she might know what to do. She is so very kind and understanding, don’t you know, papa?--and she would know what to do.” For the first time Colonel Kingsward gave his agitated little visitor a smile. “You seem to have some understanding, too, for a little girl,” he said, “and it looks as if you would be worthy of my confidence, Betty. When I see you this afternoon I shall, perhaps, have something to tell you that----” There came over Colonel Kingsward’s fine countenance a smile, a consciousness, which filled Betty with amaze. She had seen her father look handsome, commanding, very serious. She had seen him wear an air which the girls in their profanity had been used in their mother’s happy days to call that of the _père noble_. She had seen him angry, even in a passion, as to-day. She had heard him, alas! blaspheme, which had been very terrible to Betty. But she had never, she acknowledged to herself, seen him look _silly_ before. Silly, in a girl’s phraseology, was what he looked now, with that fatuity which is almost solely to be attributed to one cause; but of this Betty was not aware. It came over his countenance, and for a moment Colonel Kingsward let himself go on the flood of complacent consciousness, which healed all his wounds. Then he suddenly braced himself up and turned to Betty again.