Page:Robins - My Little Sister.djvu/50

38 and the thing for me to do was to send him some proper food—all of which was done in collusion with Martha.

I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages. Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account.

I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to. That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common clay, Martha Loring.

The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two years or more after she "went under."

Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well again—so well that she insisted on going for a walk.

My mother wrapped her warmly, and I knelt down and put on her leggings and overshoes. But, after all, we only stayed out about ten