Betty Madison arrived in Washington two days before Christmas, with the sensation of having lived through several life-times since Lady Mary's car had left the Pennsylvania station on the fourteenth of March; she half expected to see several new public buildings, and she found herself wondering if her old friends were much changed.
People capable of the deepest and most enduring impressions often receive these impressions upon apparently shallow waters. They feel the blow, but it skims the surface at the moment, to choose its place and sink slowly, surely, into the thinking brain.
Betty's immediate attitude toward the tragic fact of Harriet's death was almost spectacular. She felt herself the central figure in a thrilling and awful drama, its horror stifling for a moment the hope that th
