"Of course, Miss Betty, you will come," said Fortescue cordially, his heart hardening against Betty as he spoke.
"Certainly, I will," she answered, with a brilliant smile. "I shall be glad to see Rosehill gay once more."
When the ball was over, in the early hours of the morning, with the earth still wrapped in pitch darkness, and Betty was driving home, a faint moan escaped her lips. It was bad enough to have to meet Fortescue constantly, but to go to Rosehill---- She might, it is true, deceive everybody in the county on a pretense of illness, but she could not deceive Fortescue, the person whom she most wished to deceive. She would go, no matter what it cost her.
The ball at Rosehill was a torturing thing to Betty. By that time, as it is with the wild hearts of youth, she had a settled and burning resentment against Fortescue, which she concealed from the world with pretty smiles and gay words. Fortescue, as he said, could not do things as the county people did, but with well meant generosity he did everything well at his ball so far as money could go. There was a profusion of flowers ordered from Baltimore, along with the conventional supper, totally unlike what the county people had, and a band of music beside which the fiddles of Isaac Minkins and Uncle Cesar and the "lap organ" paled. These novelties pleased everybody except Betty, who walked through the rooms where she had spent nineteen years of her short life, and looked around her with a supercilious smile that infuriated Fortescue.
The ball kept up late. Fortescue was an admirable host, and his guests enjoyed themselves. It was quite five o'clock before the last guest had left, and during the night there had been a fall of snow. The lights were out, and Fortescue, in his bedroom, which had once been Betty's, was smoking his last cigar, and cursing the treachery of a woman--of Betty Beverley, who had won his brave and honest heart, and then, through sheer unreason and heartlessness, had cast him off. He threw the stump of his cigar savagely into the fire, and, going to the window which looked toward Holly Lodge, put it up to inhale the cold, clear air. The blackness and darkness had given way to a pale gray, which preceded the dawn, and by the ghostly half-light, he saw from the roof of Holly Lodge a great cloud of black smoke ascend, and little tongues of flame leaping wickedly.