He had limped up on his stick. He spoke
like an elderly, affectionate gnome, not like a child.
"Don't do that, mother," he said. "Don't let it upset you so, whatever
it is."
"It's so long ago; it's so far away!" she wept, with catches in her
breath and voice. "You never came!"
Betty knelt down and enfolded her again. Her bell-like voice was firm
and clear.
"I have come now," she said. "And it is not far away. A cable will reach
father in two hours."
Pursuing a certain vivid thought in her mind, she looked at her watch.
"If you spoke to mother by cable this moment," she added, with
accustomed coolness, and she felt her sister actually start as she
spoke, "she could answer you by five o'clock."
Lady Anstruther's start ended in a laugh and gasp more hysteric than her
first. There was even a kind of wan awakening in her face, as she lifted
it to look at the wonderful newcomer. She caught her hand and held it,
trembling, as she weakly laughed.
"It must be Betty," she cried. "That little stern way! It is so like
her. Betty--Betty--dear!" She fell into a sobbing, shaken heap upon
the heather. The harrowing thought passed through Betty's mind that she
looked almost like a limp bundle of shabby clothes.
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