Yet it was a relief when all the guests were gone and she was left alone to the mingled sweet and bitter feelings of her last days as mistress of Kingdon Hall. The worldly spirit in Bettina, diminished as it was, had not wholly disappeared, and never would as long as she was young and healthy and so beautiful. These attributes carried with them a certain love of display, and although it was a trial to be borne with dignity, it was still a trial to her to think of losing forever the splendid place which she had for a short year or two held in the great world.
Bettina was writing in the library one morning when her attention was arrested by the sound of an approaching footstep. The next moment a servant announced,
At this name she started violently. So long accustomed to associate it with one person, she forgot for the instant that another bore it now. As she rose, startled and expectant, through the portière held back by the servant there entered a man whose sharp dissimilarity to the image in her mind made her catch her breath.
The next second she knew that it was Horace, and realized that she was trembling from head to foot. The breadth of the room was between them, for he had paused just within the door, nodding to the servant to withdraw.
Perhaps she was no more startled by the surprise which the sight of him occasioned than was he at the sight of her; but the quality of the surprise was different. It was her beauty, her so far more than recollected beauty, which had arrested him and held him spellbound. He had left her sick with grief about her mother, the color faded from her cheeks, her eyes dulled with weeping. There had been, moreover, in her expression an apathy which his ardent words had failed to do away with. Besides these inherent things, the extrinsic points were glaringly a contrast to the present ones. Then her somewhat too slight figure had been dressed in gowns of village make and fit, and her lovely hair had been carelessly wound up, without regard to fashion or effect.
Now he saw confronting him a woman whom nature had endowed with a rare beauty, and for whom art had also done its best in the matter of outward adornment. True, she was clad in plain unrelieved black from head to foot, but no other costume could have so exquisitely displayed her glowing loveliness of coloring or the pure correctness of her outlines.