Betty was a young woman who could keep her own counsel and baffle any curiosity-monger or purveyor of gossip in the country.

So when she married Captain Connor, a little gasp went round the neighbourhood, which for the first time remembered Leonard Boyce.

There were some who blamed her for callous treatment of Boyce, away and forgotten at the front.

The majority, however, took the matter calmly, as we have had to take far more amazing social convulsions.

The fact remained that Betty was married, and there was no reason whatever, on the score of the old engagement, for Boyce to manifest such exaggerated shyness with regard to Wellingsford society.
If it had been any other man than Boyce, I should not have worried about the matter at all.