I was quite contented now and assured as to the future. I foreknew the future would be tranquil and lacking in any particular excitement, and I had already ceded, in anticipation, the last tittle of mastery over my own actions; but Bettie would keep me to the mark, would wring--not painlessly perhaps--from Robert Townsend the very best there was in him; and it would be this best which, unalloyed, would endure, in what I wrote. I had never imagined that, for the ore, smelting was an agreeable process; so I shrugged, and faced my future contentedly.
One day I said, "To-morrow I must have holiday. There are certain things that need burying, Bettie dear, and--it is just the funeral of my youth I want to go to."
"So it is to-morrow that we go for an admiring walk around our emotions!" Bettie said. She knew well enough of what event to-morrow was the anniversary, and it is to her credit she added: "Well, for this once--!" For of all the women whom I had loved, there was but one that Bettie Hamlyn had ever bothered about. And to-morrow was Stella's birthday, as I had very unconcernedly mentioned a few moments earlier, when I was looking for the Austin Dobson book, and had my back turned to Bettie.
