Chapter XXVII…

Chapter XXVII

It was dark night when Beth got back to the little house in Orchard Street. She had hoped to slip in unobserved, but her mother was looking out for her.

"Where have you been?" she demanded angrily.

Beth had come in prepared to tell the whole exciting story, but this reception irritated her, and she answered her mother in exactly the same tone: "I've been at Fairholm."

"What have you been doing there?" Mrs. Caldwell snapped.

"Getting myself into a mess, as any one might see who looked at me," Beth rejoined. "I must go and change."

"You can go to bed," said her mother.

"Thank you," said Beth, and went off straight away.

Mrs. Caldwell would have liked to have followed her, and given her a good beating, as in the old days, had she dared. Her harshness, however, had much the same effect upon Beth that a beating used to have; it shut her up in herself, and deprived her of the power to take her mother into her confidence.

Harriet followed her to her room. "Whativer 'ave you been doin'?" she exclaimed. "You're draggled from top to toe, and your Sunday dress too!"

"I got caught by the tide," said Beth; "and I'm done."

"Just you get into bed, then," said Harriet; "and I'll fetch you up some tea when she goes out. She's off in a moment to Lady Benyon's."

"Bless you, Harriet!" Beth exclaimed. "I read in a book once that there is no crime but has some time been a virtue, and I am sure it will be a virtue to steal me some tea on this occasion, if it ever is."

"Oh, all's fair in love and war," Harriet answered cheerfully, as she helped Beth off with her boots; "and you and yer ma's at war again, I guess."

"Seems like it," Beth sighed. "But stay, though. No, you mustn't steal the tea. I promised Aunt Victoria. And that reminds me. There's some still left in her little canister. Here, take it and make it, and have some yourself as a reward for the trouble. Hot tea and toast, an you love me, Harriet, and to save my life. I've had nothing but salt water since breakfast."

When Beth went downstairs next morning, her mother scowled at her. "What did you mean by telling me you had been at Fairholm yesterday?" she asked.

"I meant to tell you where I had been," Beth answered impertinently.

"I saw your Aunt Grace Mary last night, and she told me she had not seen you."

"Well, Aunt Grace Mary is a good size," Beth rejoined, "but she doesn't cover the whole estate."

Mrs. Caldwell flushed angrily. "You're an ill-conditioned girl, and will come to a bad end, or I'm much mistaken," she exclaimed.

"With the help of my relations, it's likely," Beth retorted.

Her mother said no more until breakfast was over, and then she ordered her peremptorily to get out her lessons.

"Oh, lessons!" Beth grumbled. "What's the use of the kind of lessons I do? I'm none the better for knowing that Henry VIII. had six wives, nor the happier, nor the richer; and my wit and wisdom certainly don't increase, nor my manners improve, if you speak the truth."

Mrs. Caldwell changed countenance. If Beth rebelled against the home-teaching, what would happen about the money that Jim was enjoying? Upon reflection, her mother saw she was making a mistake.

"I think," she began in a conciliatory tone, "you are right perhaps. You had better not do any lessons this morning, for I am sure you cannot be well, Beth, or you would never speak to your mother in such a way."

"Well, I'm sorry, mamma," Beth rejoined in a mollified tone. "But you know I cannot stand these everlasting naggings and scoldings. They make me horrid. I'm pugnacious when I'm rubbed the wrong way; I can't help it."

"There, there, then; that will do," Mrs. Caldwell replied. "Run out and amuse yourself, or have a rest. You take too much exercise, and tire yourself to death; and then you are so cross there is no speaking to you. Go away, like a good child, and amuse yourself until you feel better."

Beth went back to her own room at once, only too glad to escape and be alone. She was not well. Every bone in her body ached, and her head was thumping so she had to lie down on her bed at last, and keep still for the rest of the day. But her mind was active the whole time, and it was a happy day. She expected nothing, yet she was pleasurably satisfied, perfectly content.

The next morning at eleven there was service in the church at the end of the road. Beth and her mother had been having the usual morning misery at lessons, and both were exhausted when the bell began to ring. Beth's countenance was set sullen, and Mrs. Caldwell's showed suppressed irritation. The bell was a relief to them.

"Can I go to church?" Beth asked.

Her mother's first impulse was to say no, out of pure contrariness; but the chance of getting rid of Beth on any honourable pretext was too much of a temptation even for her to withstand. "Yes, if you like," she answered ungraciously, after a moment's hesitation; "and get some good out of it if you can," she added sarcastically.

Beth went with honest intention. There was a glow in her chest which added fervency to her devotions, and when Alfred entered from the vestry and took his seat in the chancel pew, happiness, tingling in every nerve, suffused her. His first glance was for her, and Beth knew it, but bent her head. Her soul did magnify the Lord, however, and her spirit did rejoice in God her Saviour, with unlimited love and trust. He had saved them, He would hear them. He would help them, He would make them both--both good and great--great after a pause, as being perhaps not a worthy aspiration.

She did not look at Alfred a second time, but she sat and stood and knelt, all conscious of him, and it seemed as if the service lasted but a moment.

Directly it was over, she fled, taking the narrow path by the side of the church to the fields; but before she was half way across the first field, she heard a quick step following her. Beth felt she must stop short--or run; she began to run.

"Beth! Beth! wait for me," he called.

Beth stopped, then turned to greet him shyly; but when he came close, and put his arm round her, she looked up smiling. They gazed into each other's eyes a moment, and then kissed awkwardly, like children.

"Were you any the worse for our adventure?" he asked. "I've been longing to know."

"I had a headache yesterday," said Beth. "How were you?"

"All stiff and aching," he replied, "or I should have been to ask after you."

"I'm glad you didn't come," Beth ejaculated.

"Why? I ought to know your people, you know. Why don't the Richardsons know them?"

"Because we're poor," Beth answered bluntly; "and Mr. Richardson neglects his poor parishioners."

"All the more reason that I should call," Alfred Cayley Pounce persisted. "You are people of good family like ourselves, and old Rich is a nobody."

"Yes," said Beth; "but my mother would not let me know you. She and I are always--always--we never agree, you know. I don't think we can help it; we certainly don't do it on purpose--at least I don't; but there's something in us that makes us jar about everything. I was going to tell her all about you on Sunday night; but when I got in I couldn't. She began by being angry because I was late, without waiting to know if I were to blame, and that--that shut me up, and I never told her; and now I don't think I could."

"But what objection can she have to me?" he asked loftily. "I really must make her acquaintance."

"Not through me, then," said Beth. "Do you know the Benyons?"

"No, I don't know anybody in the neighbourhood as yet. I'm here with old Rich to be crammed. My people are trying to force me into the bar or the church or something, because I want to be a sculptor."

"Don't be forced," said Beth with spirit. "Follow your own bent. I mean to follow mine."

"I didn't know girls had any bent," he answered dubiously.

There was a recoil in Beth. "How is it people never expect a girl to do anything?" she exclaimed, firing up.

"I don't see what a girl can do," he rejoined, "except marry and look after her husband and children."

"That's all right at the proper time," Beth said. "But meanwhile, and if she doesn't marry, is she to do nothing?"

"Oh, there are always lots of little things a woman can do," he answered airily.

"But supposing little things don't satisfy her, and she has power to follow some big pursuit?"

"Oh, well, in that case," he began, somewhat superciliously. "But it's too rare to be taken into account--talent in women."

"How do you know?" Beth said. "Robbing women of the means to develop their talents doesn't prove they haven't any. The best horseman in the world could never have ridden if he hadn't had a horse. I certainly think a woman should see to the ordering of her household; but if she has it in her to do more why shouldn't she? I shall want to do more, I know. I shall want to be something; and I shall never believe that I cannot be that something until I have tried the experiment. If you have it in you to be a sculptor, be a sculptor. I certainly should, girl and all as I am. I couldn't help it."

"You're very valiant!" he said drily; "but you don't know what it is to have your whole family against you."

"Don't I?" said Beth, laughing. "I've known that all my life; but I've known something besides. I've known what it is to be myself. If you know yourself, and yourself is a sculptor, you're bound to be a sculptor in spite of your family."

He looked at her admiringly. "When you talk like that, I feel I could be anything or do anything that you like, I love you so," he ventured, flipping the grass with his stick to cover his boyish embarrassment. "I am thinking of you always, all day long."

"Isn't it strange!" Beth answered softly. "And only two days ago we had never met!"

"But now we shall never part," he said. "Only I don't want you to be anything, or to care to be anything, but just my wife."

The word wife came upon Beth with the shock of a sweet surprise. She had not realised that she would ever be asked to be any one's wife; that seemed something reserved for the honour of beings above her, beautiful beings in books; and the hot flush of joy that suffused her at the word rendered her oblivious to the condition attached. She looked up in the young man's face with eyes full of love and gratitude, her transparent skin bright with a delicate blush, and her lips just parted in a smile.

"You are sweet, Beth!" he exclaimed. "How sweet you are!"

For the next few weeks they saw each other every day, if it were only for a few minutes; but even when they contrived to spend long hours together it was not enough. Beth scarcely ate or slept at that time; the glow and spring and flood of feeling that coursed through her whole being sustained her.

"When we are married we shall always be together," Alfred would whisper when they had to separate; and then their eyes would dilate with joy at the heavenly prospect; each was covered the while with smiles and confusion neither of which they could control. They made each other no formal vows. It was all taken for granted between them. Now they were engaged; but when they were old enough, and had an income, they were to be married.

Alfred had given up the idea of making Mrs. Caldwell's acquaintance before it was absolutely necessary. For the present, it delighted them to think that their secret was all their own, and no one suspected it, except Dicksie, the vicar's hunchback son, whom Alfred had taken into his confidence. Dicksie was as old as Alfred, but his deformity had stunted his growth, and the young lovers, looking down into his pathetic face, were filled with compassion, and eagerly anxious to make atonement to him for his misfortune by sharing as much of their happiness with him as might be. They encouraged him to accompany them in their walks when he could, which was a joy to him, for he was content to live upon the fringe of their romance unselfishly. When they separated, Beth and Alfred kissed each other frankly, and then Beth would stoop and kiss Dicksie also, in pure affection.

Neither of the three troubled themselves about other people in those days, and they never suspected that their own doings could be of consequence to anybody. They therefore remained serenely unaware of the fact that the whole place was talking about them, their own relations being the only people who did not know of the intimacy; and, worse still, everybody objected to it. All the forces of Nature combined, and the vast scheme of the universe itself had been ordered so as to unite those two young things; but, on the other hand, the whole machinery of civilisation was set in readiness to keep them apart. And the first intimation they had of this fact took them by surprise.

The whole happy summer had passed, and autumn was with them, mellow, warm, and still. The days were shorter then, and the young people delighted to slip out at dusk, and wander about the fields, all three together. A gate opened from the vicarage grounds into the field-path beside the church, and there Alfred and Dicksie waited till Beth appeared, and often waited in vain, for Beth could not always get out. Her mother told Lady Benyon that Beth was tiresome rather than naughty in those days. She seemed to have no idea of time. She would stay out so late that her mother became quite fidgety about her, not knowing what had become of her; and when Beth came in at last in a casual way, beaming blandly at every one, it was certainly provoking. Beth thought her mother unreasonable to object to her late rambles. She was not giving her any trouble; and she could not understand why her mother was not content to let her be happy in her own way.

Beth's lessons became more perfunctory than ever that summer. Mrs. Caldwell salved her own conscience on the subject by arguing that it is not wise to teach a girl too much when she is growing so fast, and Lady Benyon agreed. Lady Benyon had no patience with people who over-educate girls--with boys it was different; but let a girl grow up strong and healthy, and get her married as soon as possible, was what she advised. Had any one asked what was to become of a girl brought up for that purpose solely, if no one were found to marry her, Lady Benyon would have disposed of the question with a shrug of the shoulders. She laid down the principle, and if it did not act, somebody must be to blame. The principle itself was good, she was sure of that. So Beth was kept without intellectual discipline to curb her senses at this critical period, and the consequence was that her energy took the form of sensuous rather than intellectual pursuits. Her time was devoted not to practising, but to playing; to poetry, and to dreamy musings. She wove words to music at the piano by the hour together, lolled about in languorous attitudes, was more painfully concerned than ever about her personal adornment, delighted in scents and in luxurious imaginings, and altogether fed her feelings to such excess, that if her moral nature were not actually weakened, it was certainly endangered.

Fortunately she had an admirable companion in Alfred. The boy is not naturally like a beast, unable to restrain his passions, a bit more than the girl. To men as to women the power to control themselves comes of the determination. There are cases of natural depravity, of course, but they are not peculiar to either sex; and as the girl may inherit the father's vices, so may the boy have his mother to thank for his virtues. Depravity is oftener acquired than inherited. As a rule, the girl's surroundings safeguard her from the acquisition; but when they do not, she becomes as bad as the boy. The boy, on the contrary, especially if he is sent to a public school, is systematically trained to be vicious. He learns the Latin grammar from his masters, and from the habitual conversation of the other boys, the books secretly circulated by them, and their traditional code of vice, he becomes familiarised with the most hoggish habits. He may escape the practical initiation by a miracle at the time; but it is from the mind familiar with ideas of vice that the vicious impulse eventually springs; and the seed of corruption once sown in it, bears fruit almost inevitably.

Alfred had escaped this contamination by being kept at home at a day-school, and when Beth knew him he was as refined and high-minded as he was virile for his age, and as self-restrained as she was impetuous. She wanted to hurry on, and shape their lives; but he was content to let things come about. She lived in the future, he in the present; and he was teaching her to do the same, which was an excellent thing for her. Often when she was making plans he would check her by saying, "Aren't you satisfied? I can't imagine myself happier than I am at this moment."

One thing neither of them ever anticipated, and that was interference. They expected those happy days to last without interruption until the happier ones came, when they should be independent, and could do as they liked.

"When I am king, diddle, diddle, you shall be queen," Alfred used to sing to Beth; "and Dicksie shall be prime minister."

One night they were out in the fields together. Beth was sitting on a rail, with her arm round Dicksie's neck, as he stood on one side of her; Alfred being on the other, with his arm round her, supporting her. They were talking about flowers. Alfred was great on growing flowers. The vicar had given him a piece of the vicarage garden for his own, and he was going to build a little green-house to keep Beth well supplied with bouquets. They were deeply engrossed in the subject, and the night was exceedingly dark, so that they did not notice a sailor creep stealthily up the field behind them on the other side of the hedge, and crouch down near enough to hear all that they said. Certainly that sailor was never more at sea in his life than he was while he listened to their innocent prattle.

When at last Beth said it was time to go home, and they strolled away arm in arm, Alfred and Dicksie discovered that they were late, and Beth insisted on parting from them at the field-gate into the vicarage grounds instead of letting them see her safe into the street. When they left her, she hurried on down the path beside the church alone, and she had not taken many steps before she was suddenly confronted by a tall dark man, who made as if he would not let her pass. She stopped startled, and then went straight up to him boldly and peered into his face.

"Is that you, Gard?" she exclaimed. "How dare you!"

"How dare you!" he rejoined impudently. "I've had my eye on you for some time. I saw you out there just now in the field. I was determined to know what you were up to. There's mighty little happens here that I don't know."

"Oh," said Beth, "so you're the town spy, are you? Well, you're not going to spy upon me, so I warn you, Mr. Gard. The next time I come here, I'll come armed, and if I catch you dogging me about again, I'll shoot you as dead as my father's pistols can do it. And as it is, you shall pay for this, I promise you. Just step aside now, you cowardly black devil, and let me pass. Do you think that it's milk I've got in my veins that you come out on a fool's errand to frighten me?"

Without a word the man stepped aside, and Beth walked on down the path with her head in the air, and deliberately, to let him see how little she feared him.

The next morning, directly after breakfast, she went down to the pier. Count Bartahlinsky's yacht was alongside, and Gard was on deck. He changed countenance when Beth appeared. She ran down the ladder.

"I want to see your master," she said.

"He can't see you, miss. He's given orders that he's not to be disturbed for no one whatsoever," Gard answered with excess of deference; "and it's as much as my billet is worth to go near him; he's very much occupied this morning."

"Don't tell lies," said Beth. "I'm going to see him."

She went forward to the skylight as she spoke, and called down, "Below there, Count Gustav!"

"Hello!" a voice replied. "Is that you, Beth? You know you're too big to be on the yacht now without a chaperon."

"Rot!" said Beth.

"Don't be coarse, Beth," Count Gustav remonstrated from below in rather a precious tone. "You know how I dislike hoyden English."

"Well, then, nonsense! if that's any better," Beth rejoined. "You've got to see me--this once at all events, or there'll be a tragedy."

"Oh, in that case," was the resigned reply, "I'll come on deck."

Beth walked aft and waited for him, enthroned on the bulwark, with a coil of rope for her footstool.

When Count Gustav appeared, he looked at her quizzically. "What is the matter, Beth?" he asked. "What are you boiling with indignation about now?"

"About that man Gard," Beth replied. "What do you think he was doing last night? and not for the first time, by his own account. Spying!"

"Spying!" said Bartahlinsky. "Gard, come here."

Gard, who had been anxiously watching them from amidships, approached.

"Now, Beth, what do you mean?" said the Count.

"I mean that I was out sitting on a rail in the church-fields last night with Alfred Cayley Pounce and Dicksie Richardson talking, and this man came and listened; and then when I left them, he met me on the path beside the church, and spoke impudently to me, and would not let me pass. I know what you thought," she broke out, turning upon Gard. "You thought I was doing something that I was ashamed of, and you'd find it out, and have me in your power. But I'll have you know that I do nothing I'm ashamed of--nothing I should be ashamed to tell your master about, so you may save yourself the trouble of spying upon me, Black Gard, as they well call you."

Gard was about to say something, but Count Gustav stopped him peremptorily. "You can go," he said. "I'll hear what you have to say later."

Then he sat down beside Beth, and talked to her long and earnestly. He advised her to give up her rambles with Alfred and Dicksie; but she assured him that that was impossible.

"Who else have I?" she asked pathetically. "And what am I to do with my days if they never come into them again?"

"You ought to have been sent to school, Beth, long ago, and I told your mother so," Count Gustav answered, frowning. "And, by Jove, I'll tell her again," he thought, "before it's too late."

The encounter with Gard added excitement to the charm of Beth's next meeting with the boys. It made them all feel rather important. They discussed it incessantly, speculating as to what the man's object could have been. Alfred said vulgar curiosity; but Beth suspected that there was more than that in the manoeuvre; and when Dicksie suggested acutely that Gard had intended to blackmail them, she and Alfred both exclaimed that that was it!

They had gone about together all this time in the most open way; now they began to talk about caution and concealment, like the persecuted lovers of old romance, who had powerful enemies, and were obliged to manage their meetings so that they should not be suspected. They decided not to speak to each other in public, and, consequently, when they met in the street, they passed with such an elaborate parade of ignoring each other, and yet with such evident enjoyment of the position, that people began to wonder what on earth they were up to. Disguises would have delighted them; but the fashions of the day did not lend themselves much to disguise, unfortunately. There were no masks, no sombreros, no cloaks; and all they could think of was false whiskers for Alfred; but when he tried them, they altered him so effectually that Dicksie said he could not bear him, and Beth would not kiss him.

One evening after dinner, when Mrs. Caldwell was reading aloud to Beth and Bernadine, there came a thundering knock at the front door, which startled them all. The weather had been bad all day, and now the shutters were closed, the rain beat against them with a chilly, depressing effect, inexpressibly dreary. Instead of attending to the reading, Beth had been listening to the footsteps of people passing in the street, in the forlorn hope that among them she might distinguish Alfred's. When the knock came they thought it was a runaway, but Harriet opened the door all the same, and presently returned, smiling archly, and holding aloft a beautiful bouquet.

"What's that?" said Mrs. Caldwell. "Give it to me."

Beth's heart stood still.

There was a card attached to the flowers, and Mrs. Caldwell read aloud, "Miss Caldwell, with respectful compliments."

"Who brought this, Harriet?" she asked.

"No one, ma'am," Harriet replied. "It was 'itched on till the knocker."

"Very strange," Mrs. Caldwell muttered suspiciously. "Beth, do you know anything about it?"

"Is there no name on the card?" Beth asked diplomatically; and Mrs. Caldwell looked at the card instead of into Beth's face, and discovered nothing.

Raindrops sparkled on the flowers, their fragrance filled the room, and their colours and forms and freshness were a joy to behold. "How beautiful they are!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed.

"May I have them, mamma?" Beth put in quickly.

"Well, yes, I suppose you may," Mrs. Caldwell decided; "although I must say I do not understand their being left in this way at all. Who could have sent you flowers?"

"There's the gardener at Fairholm," Beth ventured to suggest.

"Oh, ah, yes," said Mrs. Caldwell, handing the flowers to Beth without further demur. The gift appeared less lovely, somehow, when she began to associate it with the gardener's respectful compliments.

Beth took the flowers, and hid her burning face with them. This was her first bouquet, the most exquisite thing that had ever happened to her. She carried it off to her room, and put it in water; and when she went to bed she kept the candle burning that she might lie and look at it.

The following week a menagerie came to the place. Alfred and Dicksie went to it, and their description filled Beth with a wild desire to see the creatures, especially the chimpanzee. The boys were quite ready to take her, but how was it to be managed? The menagerie was only to be there that one night more, but it would be open late, and they would be allowed to go because animals are improving. Could she get out too? Beth considered intently.

"I can go to bed early," she said at last, "and get out by the acting-room window."

"But suppose you were missed?" Alfred deprecated.

"Then I should be found out," said Beth; "but you would not."

"How about being recognised in the menagerie, though?" said Dicksie. "You see there'll be lots of people, and it's all lighted up."

"I can disguise myself to look like an old woman," Beth rejoined, thinking of Aunt Victoria's auburn front and some of her old things.

"Oh no, Beth!" Alfred protested. "That would be worse than the whiskers."

"Can't you come as a boy?" said Dicksie.

"I believe I can," Beth exclaimed. "There's an old suit of Jim's somewhere that would be the very thing--one he grew out of. I believe it's about my size, and I think I know where it is. What a splendid idea, Dicksie! I can cut my hair off."

"Oh no! Your pretty hair!" Alfred exclaimed.

"Is it pretty?" said Beth, surprised and pleased.

"Is it pretty!" he ejaculated, lifting it with both hands, and bathing his face in it; "the brightest, brownest, curliest, softest, sweetest hair on earth! Turn it up under your cap. These little curls on your neck will look like short hair."

They were all so delighted with this romantic plan, that they danced about, and hugged each other promiscuously. But this last piece of cleverness was their undoing, for Beth was promptly recognised at the menagerie by some one with a sense of humour, who told Lady Benyon, who told Mrs. Caldwell.

Mrs. Caldwell came hurrying home from Lady Benyon's a few nights later with the queerest expression of countenance Beth had ever seen; it was something between laughing and crying.

"Beth," she began in an agitated manner, "I am told that you went with two of Mr. Richardson's sons to the menagerie on Tuesday night, dressed as a boy."

"One of his sons," said Beth, correcting her; "the other boy was his pupil."

"And you were walking about looking at the animals in that public place with your arm round the girl from the shoe-shop?"

Beth burst out laughing. "All the boys had their arms round girls," she explained. "I couldn't be singular."

Mrs. Caldwell dropped into a chair, and sat gazing at Beth as if she had never seen anything like her before, as indeed she never had.

"Who is this pupil of Mr. Richardson's?" she asked at last, "and how did you make his acquaintance?"

"His name is Alfred Cayley Pounce," Beth answered. "We were caught by the tide and nearly drowned together on the sands, and I've known him ever since."

"And do you mean to say that you have been meeting this young man in a clandestine manner--that you hadn't the proper pride to refuse to associate with him unless he were known to your family and you could meet him as an equal?"

"He did wish to make your acquaintance, but I wouldn't let him," Beth said.

"Why?" Mrs. Caldwell asked in amazement.

"Oh, because I was afraid you would be horrid to him," Beth answered.

Mrs. Caldwell was thunderstruck. The whole affair had overwhelmed her as a calamity which could not be met by any ordinary means. Scolding was out of the question, for she was not able to utter another word, but just sat there with such a miserable face, she might have been the culprit herself, especially as she ended by bursting into tears.

Beth's heart smote her, and she watched her mother for some time, yearning to say something to comfort her.

"I don't think you need be so distressed, mamma," she ventured at last "What have I done, after all? I've committed no crime."

"You've done just about as bad a thing as you could do," Mrs. Caldwell rejoined. "You've made the whole place talk about you. You must have known you were doing wrong. But I think you can have no conscience at all."

"I think I have a conscience, only it doesn't always act," Beth answered disconsolately. "Very often, when I am doing a wrong thing, it doesn't accuse me; when it does, I stop and repent."

She was sitting beside the dining-table, balancing a pencil on her finger as she spoke.

"Look at you now, Beth," her mother ejaculated, "utterly callous!"

Beth sighed, and put the pencil down. She despaired of ever making her mother understand anything, and determined not to try again.

"Beth, I don't know what to do with you," Mrs. Caldwell recommenced after a long silence. "I've been warned again and again that I should have trouble with you, and Heaven knows I have. You've done a monstrous thing, and, instead of being terrified when you're found out, you sit there coolly discussing it, as if you were a grown-up person. And then you're so queer. You ought to be a child, but you're not. Lady Benyon likes you; but even she says you're not a child, and never were. You say things no sane child would ever think of, and very few grown-up people. You are not like other people, there's no denying it."

Beth's eyes filled with tears. To be thought unlike other people was the one thing that made her quail.

"Well, mamma, what am I to do?" she said. "I hate to vex you, goodness knows; but I must be doing something. The days are long and dreary." She wiped her eyes. "When people warned you that you would have trouble with me, they always said unless you sent me to school."

Mrs. Caldwell rocked herself on her chair forlornly. "School would do you no good," she declared at last. "No, Beth, you are my cross, and I must bear it. If I forgive you again this time, will you be a better girl in future?"

"I don't believe it's my fault that I ever annoy you," Beth answered drily.

"Whose fault is it, then?" her mother demanded.

Beth shrugged her shoulders and began to balance the pencil on her fingers once more.

Mrs. Caldwell got up and stood looking at her for a little with a gathering expression of dislike on her face which it was not good to see; then she went towards the door.

"You are incorrigible," she ejaculated as she opened it, making the remark to cover her retreat.

Beth sighed heavily, then resolved herself into a Christian martyr, cruelly misjudged--an idea which she pursued with much satisfaction to herself for the rest of the day.

In consequence of that conversation with her mother, when the evening came her conscience accused her, and she made no attempt to go out. She was to meet Alfred and Dicksie on Saturday, their next half-holiday, and she would wait till then. That was Wednesday.

During the interval, however, a strange chill came over her feelings. The thought of Alfred was as incessant as ever, but it came without the glow of delight; something was wrong.

They were to meet on the rocks behind the far pier at low water on Saturday. Few people came to the far pier, and, when they did, it was seldom that they looked over; and they could not have seen much if they had, for the rocks were brown with seaweed, and dark figures wandering about on them became indistinguishable. Beth went long before the time. It was a beautiful still grey day, such as she loved, and she longed to be alone with the sea. The tide was going out, and she had a fancy for following it from rock to rock as it went. Some of the bigger rocks were flat-topped islands, separated from the last halting-place of the tide by narrow straits, across which she sprang; and on these she would lie her length, peering down into the clear depths on the farther side, where the healthy happy sea-creatures disported themselves, and seaweeds of wondrous colours waved in fantastic forms. The water lapped up and up and up the rocks, rising with a sobbing sound, and bringing fresh airs with it that fanned her face, and caused her to draw in her breath involuntarily, and inhale long deep draughts with delight. As the water went out, bright runnels were left where rivers had been, and miniature bays became sheltered coves, paved with polished pebbles or purple mussels, and every little sandy space was ribbed with solid waves where the busy lob-worms soon began to send up their ropy castings. Beyond the break of the water the silver sea sloped up to the horizon, and on it, rocking gently, far out, a few cobles were scattered, with rich red sails all set ready, waiting for a breeze. It was an exquisite scene, remote from all wail of human feeling, and strangely tranquillising. Gradually it gained upon Beth. Her bosom heaved with the heaving water rhythmically, and she lost herself in contemplation of sea and sky scape. Before she had been many minutes prone upon the farthest rock, the vision and the dream were upon her. That other self of hers unfurled its wings, and she floated off, revelling in an ecstasy of gentle motion. Beyond the sea-line were palaces with terraced gardens, white palaces against which grass and trees showed glossy green; and there she wandered among the flowers, and waited. She was waiting for something that did not happen, for some one who did not come.

Suddenly she sat up on her rock. The sun was sinking behind her, the silver sea shone iridescent, the tide had turned. But where were the boys? She looked about her. Out on the sands beyond the rocks on her right, a man was wading in the water with a net, shrimping. Close at hand another was gathering mussels for bait, and a gentleman was walking towards her over the slippery rocks, balancing himself as though he found it difficult to keep his feet; but these were the only people in sight. The gentleman was a stranger. He wore a dark-blue suit, with a shirt of wonderful whiteness, and Beth could not help noticing how altogether well-dressed he was--too well-dressed for climbing on the rocks. She noticed his dress particularly, because well-dressed men were rare in Rainharbour. He was tall, with glossy black hair inclining to curl, slight whiskers and moustache, blue eyes, and a bright complexion. A woman with as much colour would have been accused of painting; in him it gave to some people the idea of superabundant health, to others it suggested a phthisical tendency. Beth looked at him as he approached as she looked at everybody and everything with interest--nothing escaped her; but he made no great impression upon her. She thought of him principally as a man with a watch; and when he was near enough she asked him what time it was. He told her, looking hard at her, and smiling pleasantly as he returned his watch to his pocket. She noticed that his teeth were good, but too far apart, a defect which struck her as unpleasant.

"Why, it is quite late!" she exclaimed, forgetting to thank him in her surprise.

"Are you all alone here?" he asked.

"I was waiting for some friends," she answered, "but they have not come. They must have been detained."

She began to walk back as she spoke, and the gentleman turned too perforce, for the tide was close upon them.

"Let me help you," he said, holding out his hand, which was noticeably white and well-shaped; "the rocks are rough and slippery."

"I can manage, thank you," Beth answered. "I am accustomed to them."

Beth involuntarily resolved herself into a young lady the moment she addressed this man, and spoke now with the self-possession of one accustomed to courtesies. Even at that age her soft cultivated voice and easy assurance of manner, and above all her laugh, which was not the silvery laugh of fiction, but the soundless laugh of good society, marked the class to which she belonged; and as he stumbled along beside her, her new acquaintance wondered how it happened that she was at once so well-bred and so shabbily dressed. He began to question her guardedly.

"Do you know Rainharbour well?" he asked.

"I live here," Beth answered.

"Then I suppose you know every one in the place," he pursued.

"Oh, no," she rejoined. "I know very few people, except my own, of course."

"Which is considered the principal family here?" he asked.

"The Benyon family is the biggest and the wickedest, I should think," she answered casually.

"But I meant the most important," he explained, smiling.

"I don't know," she said. "Uncle James Patten thinks that next to himself the Benyons are. He married one of them. He's an awful snob."

"And what is his position?"

"I don't know--he's a landowner; that's his estate over there," and she nodded towards Fairholm.

"Indeed! How far does it extend?"

"From the sea right up to the hills there, and a little way beyond."

They had left the rocks by this time, and were toiling up the steep road into the town. When they reached the top, Beth exclaimed abruptly, "I am late! I must fly!" and leaving her companion without further ceremony, turned down a side street and ran home.

When she got in, she wondered what had become of Alfred and Dicksie, and she was conscious of a curious sort of suspense, which, however, did not amount to anxiety. It was as if she were waiting and listening for something she expected to hear, which would explain in words what she held already inarticulate in some secret recess of her being--held in suspense and felt, but had not yet apprehended in the region of thought. There are people who collect and hold in themselves some knowledge of contemporary events as the air collects and holds moisture; it may be that we all do, but only one here and there becomes aware of the fact. As the impalpable moisture in the air changes to palpable rain so does this vague cognisance become a comprehensible revelation by being resolved into a shower of words on occasion by some process psychically analogous to the condensation of moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon known to babes like Beth, but ill-observed, and not at all explained, because man has gone such a little way beyond the bogey of the supernatural in psychical matters that he is still befogged, and makes up opinions on the subject like a divine when miracles are in question, instead of searching for information like an honest philosopher, whose glory it is, not to prove himself right, but to discover the truth.

Beth did not sleep much that night. She recalled the sigh and sob and freshness of the sea, and caught her breath again as if the cool water were still washing up and up and up towards her. She saw the silver surface, too, stretching on to those shining palaces, where grass and tree showed vivid green against white walls, and flowers stood still on airless terraces, shedding strange perfumes. And she also saw her new acquaintance coming towards her, balancing himself on the slippery, wrack-grown rocks, in boots and things that were much too good for the purpose; but Alfred and Dicksie never appeared, and were not to be found of her imagination. They were nowhere.

She expected to see them in church next day--at least, so she assured herself, and then was surprised to find that there was no sort of certainty in herself behind the assurance, although they had always hitherto been in church. "Something is different, somehow," she thought, and the phrase became a kind of accompaniment to all her thoughts.

Dicksie was the first person she saw when she entered the church, but Alfred was not there, and he did not come. She went up the field-path after the service, and waited about for Dicksie. When Alfred was detained himself, Dicksie usually came to explain; but that day he did not appear, and they were neither of them at the evening service. Beth could not understand it, but she was more puzzled than perturbed.

She was reading French to her mother next morning by way of a lesson, when they both happened to look up and see Mrs. Richardson, the vicar's worn-out wife, passing the window. The next moment there was a knock at the door.

"Can she be coming here?" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed.

"What should she come here for?" Beth rejoined, her heart palpitating.

"Oh dear, oh dear! this is just what I expected!" Mrs. Caldwell declared. "And if only she had come last week, I should have known nothing about it."

"You don't know much as it is," Beth observed, without, however, seeing why that should make any difference.

The next moment the vicar's wife was ushered in with a wink by Harriet. Mrs. Caldwell and Beth both rose to receive her haughtily. She had entered with assurance, but that left her the moment she faced them, and she became exceedingly nervous. She was surprised at the ease and grace of these shabbily-dressed ladies, and the refinement of their surroundings--the design of the furniture, the colour of curtains and carpet, the china, the books, the pictures, all of which bespoke tastes and habits not common in the parish.

"I must apologise for this intrusion," she began nervously. "I have a most unpleasant task to perform. My husband requested me to come----"

"Why didn't he come himself?" Beth asked blandly. "Why does he make you do the disagreeable part of his duties?"

The vicar's wife raised her meek eyes and gazed at Beth. She had not anticipated this sort of reception from poor parishioners, and was completely nonplussed. She was startled, too, by Beth's last question, for she belonged to the days of brave unhonoured endurance, when women, meekly allowing themselves to be classed with children and idiots, exacted no respect, and received none--no woman, decent or otherwise, being safe from insult in the public streets; when they were expected to do difficult and dirty work for their husbands, such as canvassing at elections, without acknowledgment, their wit and capacity being traded upon without scruple to obtain from men the votes which they were not deemed wise and worthy enough to have themselves; the days when they gave all and received nothing in return, save doles of bread and contempt, varied by such caresses as a good dog gets when his master is in the mood. That was the day before woman began to question the wisdom and goodness of man, his justice and generosity, his right to make a virtue of wallowing when he chose to wallow, and his disinterestedness and discretion when he also arrogated to himself the power to order all things. Mrs. Richardson had no more thought of questioning the beauty of her husband's decisions than she had thought of questioning the logic and mercy of her God, and this first flash of the new spirit of inquiry from Beth's bright wit came upon her with a shock at first--one of those shocks to the mind which is as the strength of wine to the exhausted body, that checks the breath a moment, then rouses and stimulates.

"May I sit down?" she gasped, then dropped into a chair. "He might have come himself, to be sure," she muttered. "I have more than enough to do that is disagreeable in my own womanly sphere without being required to meddle in parish matters."

Yet when her husband had said to her: "It is a very disagreeable business indeed this. I think I'll get you to go. You'll manage it with so much more tact than a man," the poor lady, unaccustomed to compliments, was gratified. Now, however, thanks to Beth, she had been nearer to making an acute observation than she had ever been in her life before; she all but perceived that the woman's sphere is never home exclusively when man can make use of her for his own purposes elsewhere. The sphere is the stable he ties her up in when he does not want her, and takes her from again to drag him out of a difficulty, or up to some distinction, just as it suits himself.

Mrs. Caldwell and Beth waited for Mrs. Richardson to commit herself, but gave her no further help.

"The truth is," she recommenced desperately, "we have lost an excellent pupil. His people have been informed that he was carrying on an intrigue with a girl in this place, and have taken him away at a moment's notice."

"And what has that to do with us?" Mrs. Caldwell asked politely.

"The girl is said to be your daughter."

"This is my eldest daughter at home," Mrs. Caldwell answered. "She is not yet fourteen."

"But she's a very big girl," Mrs. Richardson faltered.

"Who is this person, this pupil you allude to?" Mrs. Caldwell asked superciliously.

"He is the son of wealthy Nottingham people."

"Ah! lace manufacturers, I suppose," Mrs. Caldwell rejoined.

"Yes--s," Mrs. Richardson acknowledged with reluctance. She associated, as she was expected to do, with gentlemen who debauched themselves freely, but would have scorned the acquaintance of a shopman of saintly life.

"Then certainly not a proper acquaintance for my daughter," Mrs. Caldwell decided, with the manner of a county lady speaking to a person whom she knows to be nobody by birth. "Beth, will you be good enough to tell us what you know of this youth?"

"I was caught by the tide on the sands one day, and he was there, and helped me; and I always spoke to him afterwards. I thought I ought, for politeness' sake," Beth answered easily.

"May I ask how that strikes you?" Mrs. Caldwell, turning to Mrs. Richardson, requested to know, but did not wait for a reply. "It strikes me," she proceeded, "that your husband's parish must be in an appalling state of neglect and disorder when slander is so rife that he loses a good pupil because an act of common politeness, a service rendered by a youth on the one hand, and acknowledged by a young lady on the other, is described as an intrigue. But I still fail to see," she pursued haughtily, "why you should have come to spread this scandal here in my house."

"Oh," the little woman faltered, "I was to ask if there had been any--any presents. But," she added hastily, to save herself from the wrath which she saw gathering on Mrs. Caldwell's face, "I am sure there were not. I'm sure you would never bring a breach of promise case--I'm sure it has all been a dreadful mistake. If Mr. Richardson wants anything of this kind done in future, he must do it himself. I apologise."

She uttered the last word with a gasp.

"Let me show you out," said Beth, and the discomforted lady found herself ushered into the street without further ceremony.

When Beth returned she found her mother smiling blandly at the result of her diplomacy. It was probably the first effort of the kind the poor lady had ever made, and she was so elated by her success that she took Beth into her confidence, and forgave her outright in order to hob-nob with her on the subject.

"I think I fenced with her pretty well," she said several times. "A woman of her class, a country attorney's daughter or something of that kind, is no match for a woman of mine. I hope, Beth, this will be a lesson to you, and will teach you to appreciate the superior tact and discretion of the upper classes."

Beth could not find it in her heart to say a word to check her mother's jubilation; besides, she had played up to her, answering to expectation, as she was apt to do, with fatal versatility. But she did not feel that they had come out of the business well. It was as if their honesty had been bedraggled somehow, and she could not respect her mother for her triumph; on the contrary, she pitied her. That kind of diplomacy or tact, the means by which people who have had every advantage impose upon those who have had no advantages to speak of, did not appeal to Beth as pleasant, even at fourteen.

Mrs. Caldwell put her work away at once, and hurried off to describe the encounter to Lady Benyon.

"They had not heard of the menagerie affair, I suppose," the old lady observed, twinkling. "Thanks to yourself, I think you may consider Miss Beth is well out of that scrape. But take my advice. Get that girl married the first chance you have. I know girls, and she's one of the marrying kind. Once she's married, let her mutiny or do anything she likes. You'll be shut of the responsibility."

Chapter XXVIII

From that time forward it was as if Alfred had vanished into space. Whether he ever attempted to communicate with her, Beth could not tell; but she received no letter or message. She expected to hear from him through Dicksie, but it soon became apparent that Dicksie had deserted her. He came to none of their old haunts, and never looked her way in church or in the street when they met. She was ashamed to believe it of him at first, lest some defect in her own nature should have given rise to the horrid suspicion; but when she could no longer doubt it, she shrugged her shoulders as at something contemptible, and dismissed him from her mind. About Alfred she could not be sure. He might have sent letters and messages that never reached her, and therefore she would not blame him; but as the thought of him became an ache, she resolutely set it aside, so that, in a very short time, in that part of her consciousness where his image had been, there was a blank. Thus the whole incident ended like a light extinguished, as Beth acknowledged to herself at last. "It is curious, though," she thought, "but I certainly knew it in myself all along from the moment the change came, if only I could have got at the knowledge."

As a direct result of her separation from Alfred, Beth entered upon a bad phase. The simple satisfaction of her heart in his company had kept her sane and healthy. With such a will as hers, it had not been hard to cast him out of her anticipations; but with him, there went from her life that wholesome companionship of boy and girl which contains all the happiness necessary for their immaturity, and also stimulates their growth in every way by holding out the alluring prospect of the fulfilment of those hopes of their being towards which their youth should aspire from the first, insensibly, but without pause. Having once known this companionship, Beth did not thrive without it. She had no other interest in its place to take her out of herself, and the time hung heavy on her hands. With her temperament, however, more than a momentary pause was impossible. Her active mind, being bare of all expectation, soon began to sate itself upon vain imaginings. For the rational plans and pursuits she had been accustomed to make and to carry out with the boys, she had nothing to substitute but dreams; and on these she lived, finding an idle distraction in them, until the habit grew disproportionate, and began to threaten the fine balance of her other faculties: her reason, her power of accurate observation and of assimilating every scrap of knowledge that came in her way. To fill up her empty days, she surrounded herself with a story, among the crowding incidents of which she lived, whatever she might be doing. She had a lover who frequented a wonderful dwelling on the other side of the headland that bounded Rainharbour bay on the north. He was rich, dark, handsome, a mysterious man, with horses and a yacht. She was his one thought, but they did not meet often because of their enemies. He was engaged upon some difficult and dangerous work for the good of mankind, and she had many a midnight ride to warn him to beware, and many a wild adventure in an open boat, going out in the dark for news. But there were happy times too, when they lived together in that handsome house hidden among the flowers behind the headland, and at night she always slept with her head on his shoulder. He had a confidential agent, a doctor, whom he sent to her with letters and messages, because it was not safe for him to appear in the public streets himself. This man was just like the one she had met on the rocks, and his clothes were always too good for the occasion. His name was Angus Ambrose Cleveland.

Just at this time, Charlotte Hardy, the daughter of a doctor who lived next door to the Benyon Dower House, fell in love with Beth, and began to make much of her. Beth had never had a girl companion before, and although she rather looked down on Charlotte, she enjoyed the novelty. They were about the same age, but Charlotte was smaller than Beth, less precocious, and better educated. She knew things accurately that Beth had only an idea of; but Beth could make more use of a hint than Charlotte could of the fullest information. Beth respected her knowledge, however, and suffered pangs of humiliation when she compared it to her own ignorance; and it was by way of having something to show of equal importance that she gradually fell into the habit of confiding her romance to Charlotte, who listened in perfect good faith to the fascinating details which Beth poured forth from day to day. Beth did not at first intend to impose on her credulity; but when she found that Charlotte in her simplicity believed the whole story, she adapted her into it, and made her as much a part of it as Hector the hero, and Dr. Angus Ambrose Cleveland, the confidential agent on whom their safety depended. Charlotte was Beth's confidante now, a post which had hitherto been vacant; so the whole machinery of the romance was complete, and in excellent order.

"It's queer I never see the doctor about," Charlotte said one day, when they were out on the cliffs together.

Beth happened to look up at that moment and saw her acquaintance of the rocks coming towards them.

"Your curiosity will be gratified," she said, "for there he is."

"Where?" Charlotte demanded in an excited undertone.

"Approaching," Beth answered calmly.

"Will he speak?" Charlotte asked in a breathless whisper.

"He will doubtless make me a sign," Beth replied.

When he was near enough, the gentleman recognised Beth, and smiled as they passed each other.

"Oughtn't he to have taken off his hat?" Charlotte asked.

"He means no disrespect," Beth answered with dignity. "It is safer so. In fact, if you had not been my confidante, he would not have dared to make any sign at all."

"Oh, then he knows that I am your confidante!" Charlotte exclaimed, much gratified.

"Of course," said Beth. "I have to keep them informed of all that concerns me. I brought you here to-day on purpose. I shall doubtless have to ask you to take letters, and you could not deliver them if you did not know the doctor by sight. There is the yacht," she added, as a beautiful white-winged vessel swept round the headland into the bay.

"O Beth! aren't you excited?" Charlotte cried.

"No," Beth answered quietly. "You see I am used to these things."

"Beth, what a strange creature you are," said Charlotte, with respect. "One can see that there's something extraordinary about you, but one can't tell what it is. You're not pretty--at least I don't think so. I asked papa what he thought, and he said you had your points, and a something beyond, which is irresistible. He couldn't explain it, though; but I know what he meant. I always feel it when you talk to me; and I believe I could die for you. There's Mrs. Warner Benyon out again," she broke off to observe. "Papa was called in to see her the other day. He isn't their doctor, but she was taken ill suddenly, so they sent for him because he was at hand; and he says her shoulders are like alabaster."

Beth pursed up her mouth at this, but made no answer. When she got home, however, she repeated the observation to her mother in order to ask her what alabaster was exactly. Mrs. Caldwell flushed indignantly at the story. "If Dr. Hardy speaks in that way of his patients to his family, he won't succeed in his profession," she declared. "A man who talks about his patients may be a clever doctor, but he's sure not to be a nice man--not high-minded, you know--and certainly not a wise one. Remember that, Beth, and take my advice: don't have anything to do with a 'talking doctor'"--a recommendation which Beth remembered afterwards, but only to note the futility of warnings.

Matters became very complicated in the story as it proceeded. It was all due to some Spanish imbroglio, Beth said. Hector ran extraordinary risks, and she was not too safe herself if things went wrong. There were implicating documents, and emissaries of the Jesuits were on the look-out.

One day, Charlotte's mother being away from home, Beth asked her mysteriously if she could conceal some one in her room at night unknown to her father.

"Easily," Charlotte answered. "He never comes up to my room."

"Then you must come and ask mamma to let me spend the day and night with you to-morrow," Beth said. "I shall have business which will keep me away all day, but I shall return at dusk, and then you must smuggle me up to your room. We shall be obliged to sit up all night. I don't know what is going to happen. Are the servants safe? If I should be betrayed----"

"Safe not to tell you are there," said Charlotte, "and that is all they will know. They won't tell on me. I never tell on them."

The next morning early, Charlotte arrived in Orchard Street with a face full of grave importance, and obtained Mrs. Caldwell's consent to take Beth back with her; but instead of having to go home to spend the day alone waiting for Beth, as she had expected, she was sent out some distance along the cliffs to a high hill, which she climbed by Beth's direction. She was to hide herself among the fir-trees at the top, and watch for a solitary rider on a big brown horse, who would pass on the road below between noon and sunset, if all went well, going towards the headland.

"I shall be that rider," Beth said solemnly. "And the moment you see me, take this blue missive, and place it on the Flat Rock, with a stone on it to keep it from blowing away; then go home. If I do not appear before sunset, here is a red missive to place on the Flat Rock instead of the blue one, which must then be destroyed by fire. If I return, I return; if not, never breathe a word of these things to a living soul as you value your life."

"I would rather die than divulge anything," Charlotte protested solemnly, and her choice of the word divulge seemed to add considerably to the dignity of the proceedings.

They separated with a casual nod, that people might not suspect them of anything important, and each proceeded to act her part in a delightful state of excitement; but what was thrilling earnest to Charlotte, calling for courage and endurance, was merely an exhilarating play of the fancy put into practice to Beth.

By the time Charlotte arrived at the top of the hill, and had settled herself among the firs overlooking the road below, she was very tired. Beth had given her a bag, one of Aunt Victoria's many reticules, with orders not to open it before her watch began. The bag had been a burden to carry, but Charlotte was repaid for the trouble, for she found it full of good things to eat, and a bottle of cold coffee and cream to drink, with lumps of sugar and all complete. Beth had really displayed the most thoughtful kindness in packing that bag. The contents she had procured on a sudden impulse from a pastry-cook in the town, by promising to pay the next time she passed.

After having very much enjoyed a solid Melton Mowbray pie, a sausage in puff-pastry, a sponge-cake, a lemon cheesecake, and two crisp brandy snaps, and slowly sipped the coffee, Charlotte felt that this was the only life worth living, and formally vowed to dedicate herself for ever to the Secret Service of Humanity--Beth's name for these enterprises. She kept a careful eye on the road below all this time, and there ran through her head the while fragments of a ballad Beth had written, which added very much to the charm of the occasion.

"The fir-trees whisper overhead, Between the living and the dead, I watch the livelong day. I watch upon the mountain-side For one of courage true and tried, Who should ride by this way,"

it began. When she first heard that Beth had written that ballad, Charlotte was astonished. It was the only assertion of Beth's she had ever doubted; but Beth assured her that any one could write verses, and convinced her by "making some up" there and then on a subject which she got Charlotte to choose for her.

Many things passed on the road below--teams of waggons, drawn by beautiful big cart-horses with glossy coats, well cared for, tossing their headland rattling the polished brasses of their harness proudly, signs of successful farming and affluence; smart carriages with what Beth called "silly-fool ladies, good for nothing," in them; a carrier's cart, pedestrians innumerable, and then--then, at last, a solitary big brown horse, ridden at a steady canter by a slender girl in a brown habit (worn by her mother in her youth, and borrowed from her wardrobe without permission for the occasion). The horse was a broken-down racer with some spirit left, which Beth had hired, as she had procured the provisions, on a promise to pay. In passing, she waved a white handkerchief carelessly, as if she were flicking flies from the horse, but without relenting her speed. This was the signal agreed upon. Charlotte, glowing with excitement, and greatly relieved, watched the adventurous rider out of sight; then trudged off bravely to the Flat Rock, miles away behind the far pier, where she loyally deposited the blue missive. The red one she destroyed by fire according to orders.

Beth had warned her that she would be tired to death when she got in, and had better snatch some repose in preparation for the night.

"But if I oversleep myself and am not on the look-out for you when you come, what will you do?" Charlotte objected.

"Leave that to me," said Beth.

And Charlotte did accordingly with perfect confidence.

When she awoke the room was dark, but there was a motionless figure sitting in the window, clearly silhouetted against the sky. Charlotte, who expected surprises, was pleasantly startled.

"Is all safe in the west, sister?" she said softly, raising herself on her elbow.

"Yes," was the reply, "but clouds are gathering in the north. Our hope is in the east. Let us pray for the sunrise. You left the letter?"

"Yes. As fast as I could fly I went."

"Ah! then it will be gone by this time!" Beth ejaculated with conviction. The Flat Rock was only uncovered at low water, and now the tide was high. "Can you get me some food, little one, for I am famished?" she proceeded. "I have had nothing since the morning, and have ridden far, and have done much."

"Oh dear! oh dear!" said Charlotte. "And you got me such good things!"

"Ah! that was different," Beth rejoined.

Charlotte stole downstairs. Her father had been out seeing his patients all day, and had not troubled about her.

She returned with chicken and ham, cold apple-tart and cream, and a little jug of cider.

Poor Beth, accustomed to the most uninteresting food, and not enough of that, was so exhausted by her long fast and arduous labours, that she found it difficult to restrain her tears at the sight of such good things. She ate and drank with seemly self-restraint, however; it would have lowered her much in her own estimation if she had showed any sign of the voracity she felt.

Then the watch began. Having wrapped themselves up in their walking things to be ready for any emergency, they locked the door and opened the window softly. They were in a room at the top of the house, which, being next door to the Benyons, commanded the same extensive view down the front street and a bit of Rock Street and the back street, and up Orchard Street on the left to the church. They were watching for a sailor in a smart yachting suit, a man-of-war's man with bare feet, and a priest in a heavy black cloak. Beth, greatly refreshed and stimulated by her supper and the cider, fell into her most fascinating mood; and Charlotte listened enthralled to wonderful descriptions of places she had visited with Hector, sights she had seen, and events she had taken part in.

"But how is it you are not missed from home when you go away like that?" said Charlotte.

"How is it I am not missed to-night?" Beth answered. "When you are fully initiated into the Secret Service of Humanity you will find that things happen in a way you would never suspect."

"I suppose it is all right and proper being so much alone with single gentlemen," Charlotte just ventured.

"All things are right and proper so long as you do nothing wrong," Beth answered sententiously.

Lights began to move from room to room in the houses about them, gigantic shadows of people appeared on white window blinds in fantastic poses, and there was much moving to and fro as they prepared for bed. Then one by one the lights went out, and in the little old-fashioned window-panes the dark brightness of the sky and the crystal stars alone were reflected. It was a fine clear night, the gas burnt brightly in the quiet streets, there was not a soul stirring.

"Isn't it exquisite?" said Beth, sniffing the sweet air. "I am glad I was born, if it is only for the sake of being alive at night."

After this they were silent. Then by degrees the desire for sleep became imperative, and they both suffered acutely in their efforts to resist it. Finally Charlotte was vanquished, and Beth made her lie down on the bed. As she dropped off she saw Beth sitting rigidly at the open window; when she awoke it was bright daylight, and Beth was still there in exactly the same attitude.

"Beth," she exclaimed, "you are superhuman!"

"Ah!" said Beth, with a mysterious smile, "when you have learnt to listen to the whispers of the night, and know what they signify as I do, you will not wonder. Marvellous things have been happening while you slept."

"O Beth!" said Charlotte reproachfully, "why didn't you wake me?"

"I was forbidden," Beth answered sadly. "But now watch for me. It is your turn, and I must sleep. A yachtsman or a man-of-war's man with bare feet, remember."

Beth curled herself up on the bed, and Charlotte, very weary and aching all over, but sternly determined to do her duty, took her place in the window. She had her reward, however, and when Beth awoke she found her all on the alert, for she had seen the yachtsman. He came up the street and hung about a little, pretending to look at the shops, then walked away briskly, which showed Charlotte that the plot was thickening, and greatly excited her. Beth smiled and nodded as though well satisfied when she heard the news, but preserved an enigmatical silence.

Then Charlotte went downstairs and smuggled her up such a good breakfast--fried ham, boiled eggs, hot rolls with plenty of butter, and delicious coffee--that the famishing Beth was fain to exclaim with genuine enthusiasm--

"In spite of all the difficulty, danger, and privation we have to endure in the Secret Service of Humanity, Charlotte, is there anything to equal the delight of it?"

And Charlotte solemnly asseverated that there was not.

Much stimulated by her breakfast, Beth took leave of Charlotte. She must be alone, she said, she had much to think about. She went to the farther shore to be away from everybody. She wanted to hear what the little waves were saying to the sand as they rippled over it. It was another grey day, close and still, and the murmur of the calm sea threw her at once into a dreamy state, full of pleasurable excitement. She hid herself in a spot most soothing from its apparent remoteness, a sandy cove from which, because of the projecting cliffs on either hand, neither town nor coast could be seen, but only the sea and sky. Although the grey was uniform enough to make it impossible to tell where cloud met water on the horizon, it was not dull, but luminous with the sunshine it enfolded, and full of colour in fine gradations as Beth beheld it. She sat a long time on the warm dry sand, with her chin resting on her knees, and her hands clasped round them, not gazing with seeing eyes nor listening with open ears, but apprehending through her further faculty the great harmony of Nature of which she herself was one of the triumphant notes. At that moment she tasted life at its best and fullest--life all ease and grace and beauty, without regret or longing--perfect life in that she wanted nothing more. But she rose at last, and, still gazing at the sea, slowly unclasped her waistbelt, and let it fall on the sand at her feet; then she took her hat off, her dress, her boots and stockings, everything, and stood, ivory-white, with bright brown wavy hair, against the lilac greyness under the tall dark cliffs. The little waves had called her, coming up closer and closer, and fascinating her, until, yielding to their allurements, she went in amongst them, and floated on them, or lay her length in the shallows, letting them ripple over her, and make merry about her, the gladdest girl alive, yet with the wrapt impassive face of a devotee whose ecstasy is apart from all that acts on mere flesh and makes expression. All through life Beth had her moments, and they were generally such as this, when her higher self was near upon release from its fetters, and she arose an interval towards oneness with the Eternal.

But on this occasion she was surprised in her happy solitude. A troop of what Mrs. Caldwell called "common girls" came suddenly round the cliff into her sheltered nook, with shouts of laughter, also bent on bathing. Beth plunged in deeper to cover herself the moment they appeared; but they did not expect her to have anything on, and her modesty was lost upon them.

"How's the water?" they shouted.

"Delicious," she answered, glad to find them friendly.

They undressed as they came along, and were very soon, all of them, playing about her, ducking and splashing each other, and Beth also, including her sociably in their game. And Beth, as was her wont, responded so cordially that she was very soon heading the manoeuvres.

"We shall all be ill if we stay in any longer," she said at last. "I shall take one more dip and go and dress. Let's all take hands and dip in a row."

They did so, and then, still hand in hand, scampered up on to the beach.

"My!" one of them exclaimed, when they came to their clothes and had broken the line,--"My! ain't she nice!"

Then all the other girls stood and stared at Beth, whose fine limbs and satin-smooth white skin, so different in colour and texture from their own, drew from them the most candid expressions of admiration.

Beth, covered with confusion, hurried on a garment all wet as she was, for she had no towel; and then, in order to distract their attention from her body, she began to display her mind.

"Eh, I have had a good time!" one of the girls exclaimed. "Let's come again often."

"Let us form a secret society," said Beth, "and I will be your leader, and we'll have a watchword and a sign; and when the water is right, I'll send the word round, and then we'll start out unobserved, and meet here, and bathe in secret."

"My! that would be fine!" the girls agreed.

"But that's not all," said Beth, standing with her chemise only half on, oblivious of everything now but her subject. "It would be much better than that. There would be much more in it. We could meet in the fields by moonlight, and I would drill you, and show you a great many things, all for the Secret Service of Humanity. You don't know what we're doing! We're going to make the world just like heaven, and everybody will be good and beautiful, and have enough of everything, and we shall all be happy, because nobody will care to be happy unless everybody else has been made so. But it will be very hard work to bring it about. The wicked people are doing all they can to prevent us, and the devil himself is fighting against us. We shall conquer, however; and those who are first in the fight will be first for the glory!"

The girls, some standing, some sitting, most of them with nothing on, remained motionless while she spoke, not understanding much, yet so moved by the power of her personality, that when she exclaimed, "Well, what do you say, girls? will you join?" they all exclaimed with enthusiasm, "We will! we will!"

And then they made haste to dress as if the millennium could be hurried here by the rate at which they put on their clothes. Beth then and there composed a terrible oath, binding them to secrecy and obedience, and swore them all in solemnly; then she chose one for her orderly, who was to take round the word on occasion; and they were all to meet again in the fields behind the church on Saturday at eight o'clock.

But in the meantime, not a word!

Beth made Charlotte captain of the band; and drills, bathing rites, and other mysteries were regularly conducted, the girls being bound together more securely by the fascination of Beth's discourses, and the continual interest she managed to inspire, than by any respect they had for an oath. Beth's interest in them extended to the smallest detail of their lives. She knew which would be absent from drill because it was washing-day, and which was weak for want of food; and she resumed her poaching habits--only on Uncle James Patten's estate, of course--and, having beguiled a gunsmith into letting her have an air-gun on credit, she managed to snare and shoot birds enough to relieve their necessities to an appreciable extent. She never let any one into the secret of those supplies, and the mystery added greatly to her credit with the girls.

That season some friends of the Benyons brought their boys to stay at Rainharbour for the holidays, and Beth varied her other pursuits by rambling about with them, Lady Benyon having seen to it that she made their acquaintance legitimately, for the old lady shrewdly suspected that Beth was already beginning to attract attention. From her post of observation in the window she had seen young men turn in the street and look back at the slender girl, in spite of her short petticoats, with more interest than many a maturer figure aroused; and she had heard that Beth Caldwell was already much discussed. Beth's brother Jim, when he came home that summer, also began to introduce her to his young men friends in the neighbourhood, so that very soon Beth had quite a little court about her on the pier when the band played. She liked the boys, and the young men she found an absorbing study; but not one of them touched her heart. Her acquaintance with Alfred had made her fastidious. He had had sense enough to respect her, and his companionship had given her a fine foretaste of the love that is ennobling, the love that makes for high ideals of character and conduct, for fine purpose, spiritual power, and intellectual development, the one kind worth cultivating. In these more sophisticated youths she found nothing soul-sustaining. She philandered with some of them up to the point where comparisons become inevitable, and, so long as they met her in a spirit of frank camaraderie, it was agreeable enough; but when, with their commonplace minds, they presumed to be sentimental, they became intolerable. Still the glow was there in her breast often and often, and would be momentarily directed towards one and another; but the brightness of it only showed the defects in each; and so she remained in love with love alone, and the power of passion in her, thwarted, was transmuted into mental energy.

But Beth learnt a good deal from her young men that summer--learnt her own power, for one thing, when she found that she could twist the whole lot of them round her little finger if she chose. The thing about them that interested her most, however, was their point of view. She found one trait common to all of them when they talked to her, and that was a certain assumption of superiority which impressed her very much at first, so that she was prepared to accept their opinions as confidently as they gave them; and they always had one ready to give on no matter what subject. Beth, perceiving that this superiority was not innate, tried to discover how it was acquired that she might cultivate it. Gathering from their attitude towards her ignorance that this superiority rested somehow on a knowledge of the Latin grammar, she hunted up an old one of her brother's and opened it with awe, so much seemed to depend on it. Verbs and declensions came easily enough to her, however. The construction of the language was puzzling at the outset; but, with a little help, she soon discovered that even in that there was nothing occult. Any industrious, persevering person could learn a language, she decided; and then she made more observations. She discovered that, in the estimation of men, feminine attributes are all inferior to masculine attributes. Any evidence of reasoning capacity in a woman they held to be abnormal, and they denied that women were ever logical. They had to allow that women's intuition was often accurate, but it was inferior, nevertheless, they maintained, to man's uncertain reason; and such qualities as were undeniable they managed to discount, as, for instance, in the matter of endurance. If women were long enduring, they said, it was not because their fortitude was greater, but because they were less sensitive to suffering, and so, in point of fact, suffered less than men would under the circumstances.

This persistent endeavour to exalt themselves by lowering women struck Beth as mean, and made her thoughtful. She began by respecting their masculine minds as much as they did themselves; but then came a doubt if they were any larger and more capable than the minds of women would be if they were properly trained and developed; and she began to dip into the books they prided themselves on having read, to see if they were past her comprehension. She studied Pope's translation of the Iliad and Odyssey indoors, and she also took the little volume out under her arm; but this was a pose, for she could not read out of doors, there were always so many other interests to occupy her attention--birds and beasts, men and women, trees and flowers, land and water; all much more entrancing than the Iliad or Odyssey. Long years afterwards she returned to these old-world works with keen appreciation, and wondered at her early self; but when she read them first, she took their meanings too literally, and soon wearied of warlike heroes, however great a number of their fellow-creatures they might slay at a time, and of chattel heroines, however beautiful, which was all that Homer conveyed to her; not did she find herself elated by her knowledge of their exploits. She noticed, however, that the acquisition of such knowledge imposed upon the boys, and gained her a reputation for cleverness which made the young university prigs think it worth their while to talk to her. They had failed to discover her natural powers because there was no one to tell them she had any, and they only thought what they were told to think about people and things, and admired what they were told to admire. In this Beth differed from them widely, for she began by having tastes of her own. She did not believe that they enjoyed Homer a bit more than she did; but the right pose was to pretend that they did; so they posed and pretended, according to order, and Beth posed and pretended too, just to see what would come of it.

It was a young tutor in charge of a reading-party who helped Beth with the Latin grammar. He managed to ingratiate himself with Mrs. Caldwell, and came often to the house; and finally he began to teach Beth Latin at her own request, and with the consent of her mother. The lessons had not gone on very long, however, before he tried to insinuate into his teaching some of the kind of sophistries which another tutor had imposed by way of moral philosophy on Rousseau's Madame de Warens in her girlhood, to her undoing. This was all new to Beth, and she listened with great interest; but she failed utterly to see why not believing in a God should make it right and proper for her to embrace the tutor: so the lessons ended abruptly. Beth profited largely by the acquaintance, however,--not so much at the time, perhaps, as afterwards, when she was older, and had gained knowledge enough of men of various kinds to enable her to compare and reflect. It was her first introduction to the commonplace cleverness of the academic mind, the mere acquisitive faculty which lives on pillage, originates nothing itself, and, as a rule, fails to understand, let alone appreciate, originality in others. The young tutor's ambition was to be one of a shining literary clique of extraordinary cheapness which had just then begun to be formed. The taint of a flippant wit was common to all its members, and their assurance was unbounded. They undertook to extinguish anybody with a few fine phrases; and, in their conceited irreverence, they even attacked eternal principles, the sources of the best inspiration of all ages, and pronounced sentence upon them. Repute of a kind they gained, but it was by glib falsifications of all that is noble in sentiment, thought, and action, all that is good and true. It was the contraction of her own heart, the chill and dulness that settled upon her when she was with this man, as compared to the glow and expansion, the release of her finer faculties, which she had always experienced when under the influence of Aunt Victoria's simple goodness, that first put Beth in the way of observing how inferior in force and charm mere intellect is to spiritual power, and how soon it bores, even when brilliant, if unaccompanied by other endowments, qualities of heart and soul, such as constancy, loyalty, truthfulness, and that scrupulous honesty of action which answers to what is expected as well as to what is known of us.

Beth played very diligently at learning during this experiment, but only played for a time. The mind in process of forming itself involuntarily rejects all that is unnecessary, and that kind of knowledge was not for her. It opened up no prospect of pleasure in itself. All she cared to know was what it felt like to have mastered it; and that she arrived at by resolving herself into a lady of great attainments, who talked altogether about things she had learnt, but had nothing in her mind besides. A mind with nothing else in it, in Beth's sense of the word, was to Beth what plainness is to beauty; so, while many of her contemporaries were stultifying themselves with Greek and Latin ingenuities, she pursued the cultivation of that in herself which is beyond our ordinary apprehension, that which is more potent than knowledge, more fertilising to the mind--that by which knowledge is converted from a fallow field into a fruitful garden. Altogether, apart from her special subject, she learnt only enough of anything to express herself; but it was extraordinary how aptly she utilised all that was necessary for her purpose, and how invariably she found what she wanted--if found be the right word; for it was rather as if information were flashed into her mind from some outside agency at critical times when she could not possibly have done without it.

One sad consequence of her separation from Alfred, and the strange things she did and dreamed for distraction in the unrest of her mind, was a change in her constitution. Her first fine flush of health was over, the equability of her temper was disturbed, and she became subject to hysterical outbursts of garrulity, to fits of moody silence, to apparently causeless paroxysms of laughter or tears; and she was always anxious. She had real cause for anxiety, however, for, in her efforts to realise her romance to Charlotte's satisfaction, she had run up little bills all over the place. What would happen when they were presented, as they certainly would be sooner or later, she dared not think; but the dread of the moment preyed upon her mind to such an extent that, whenever she heard a knock at the door, she entreated God to grant that it might not be a bill. And even when there were no knocks, she went on entreating to be spared, and worked herself into such a chronic fever of worry that she was worn to a shadow, and developed a racking cough which gave her no peace.

Just at this time, too, the whole place began to be scandalised by her vagaries, her mysterious expeditions on the big brown horse, and her constant appearance in public with a coterie of young men about her. At a time when anything unconventional in a girl was clear evidence of vice to all the men and most of the women who knew of it, Beth's reputation was bound to suffer, and it became so bad at last that Dr. Hardy forbade Charlotte to associate with her. Charlotte told her with tears, and begged to be allowed to meet her in the Secret Service of Humanity as usual; but Beth refused. She said it was too dangerous just then, they must wait; the truth being that she was sick of the Secret Service of Humanity, of Charlotte, of everything and everybody that prevented her hearing when there was a knock at the door, and praying to the Lord that it might not be a bill.

The secret society was practically dissolved by this time, and very soon afterwards the catastrophe Beth had been dreading occurred, and wrought a great change in her life. It happened one day when she was not at home. Aunt Grace Mary was so alarmed by her cough and the delicacy of her appearance that she had braved Uncle James and carried her off to stay with her at Fairholm for a change. Once she was away from the sound of the knocks, Beth suffered less, and began to revive and be herself again to the extent of taking Aunt Grace Mary into her confidence boldly.

"Beth, Beth, Beth!" said that poor good lady tenderly, "you naughty girl, how could you! Running in debt with nothing to pay; why, it isn't honest!"

"So I think," said Beth in cordial agreement, taking herself aside from her own acts, as it were, and considering them impartially. "Help me out of this scrape, Aunt Grace Mary, and I'll never get into such another."

"But how much do you owe, Beth dear?"

"I'm sure I don't know," Beth answered. "Pounds for Tom Briggs alone."

"Who's he?" was Aunt Grace Mary's horrified exclamation.

"Oh, only the horse--a dark bay with black points. I rode him a lot, and oh! it was nice! It was like poetry, like living it, you know, like being a poem one's self. And I'm glad I did it. If I should die for it, I couldn't regret it. And I shouldn't wonder if I did die, for I feel as if those knocks had fairly knocked me to bits."

"Nonsense, Beth, you silly child, don't talk like that," said Aunt Grace Mary. "What else do you owe?"

"Oh, then there's Mrs. Andrews, the confectioner's, bill."

"Confectioner's!" Aunt Grace Mary exclaimed. "O Beth! I never thought you were greedy."

"Well, I don't think I am," Beth answered temperately. "I've been very hungry, though. But I never touched any of those good things myself. I only got them for Charlotte when she had heavy work to do for the Secret Service of Humanity."

"The what?" Aunt Grace Mary demanded.

"The game we played. Then there's the hairdresser's bill, that must be pretty big. I had to get curls and plaits and combs and things, besides having my hair dressed for entertainments to which I was obliged to go----"

"Beth! are you mad?" Aunt Grace Mary interrupted. "You've never been to an entertainment in your life."

"No," Beth answered casually, "but I've played at going to no end of a lot."

"Well, this is the most extraordinary game I ever heard of!"

"But it was such an exciting game," Beth pleaded with a sigh.

"But, my dear child, such a reckless, unprincipled game!"

"But you don't think of that at the time," Beth assured her. "It's all real and right then. We----"

But here the colloquy was interrupted by the arrival of Mrs. Caldwell in a state of distraction with the hairdresser's bill in her hand. Aunt Grace Mary made her sit down, and patted her shoulder soothingly. Uncle James was out. Beth, greatly relieved, looked on with interest. She knew that the worst was over.

"Never mind, Caroline," Aunt Grace Mary said cheerfully. "Beth has just been telling me all about it. Confession is good for the saints, you know, or the soul, or something; so that's cheering. She has been very naughty, very naughty indeed, but she is very sorry. She sincerely regrets. Hairdresser, did you say? Oh, give it to me! Now, do give it to me, there's a dear! And we won't have another word about it. Beth, you bad girl, be good, and say you repent."

"Say it!" Beth ejaculated, coughing. "Look at me, and you'll see it, Aunt Grace Mary. I've been repenting myself to pieces for months."

"Well, dear; well, dear," Aunt Grace Mary rejoined, beaming blandly, "that will do; that's enough, I'm sure. Mamma forgives you, so we'll have no more about it."

The hairdresser's bill was the only one Mrs. Caldwell ever heard of, for Aunt Grace Mary got the use of her pony carriage next day, by telling Uncle James her mamma had sent Caroline to say she particularly wished her to take Beth to see her. Uncle James, to whom any whim of Lady Benyon's was wisdom, ordered the carriage for them himself; and, as they drove off together, Aunt Grace Mary remarked to Beth, "I think I managed that very cleverly; don't you?" Naturally estimable women are forced into habits of dissimulation by the unreason of the tyrant in authority in many families; and Aunt Grace Mary was one of the victims. She had been obliged to resort to these small deceits for so many years, that all she felt about them now was a sort of mild triumph when they were successful. "I mean to go and see mamma, you know, so it won't be any story," she added.

She went with Beth first, however, to the various shops where Beth owed money, and paid her debts; and Beth was so overcome by her generosity, and so anxious to prove her repentance, that she borrowed sixpence more from her, and went straightway to the hairdresser's, and had all her pretty hair cropped off close like a boy's, by way of atonement. When she appeared, Lady Benyon burst out laughing; but her mother was even more seriously annoyed than she had been by the hairdresser's bill. Beth's hair had added considerably to her market value in Mrs. Caldwell's estimation. She would not have put it so coarsely, but that was what her feeling on the subject amounted to.

"What is to be done with such a child?" she exclaimed in despair.

"Send her to school," Aunt Grace Mary gasped.

"She would be expelled in a month," Mrs. Caldwell averred.

"Possibly; but it would be worth the trial," Aunt Grace Mary rejoined in her breathless way.

"Yes," Lady Benyon agreed. "She has been at home far too long, running wild, and it's the only thing to be done. But let it be a strict school."

"How am I to afford it?" Mrs. Caldwell wailed, rocking herself on her chair.

"Well, there's the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters; you can get her in there for next to nothing, and it's strict enough," Lady Benyon suggested.

And finally, after the loss of some more precious time, and with much reluctance, Mrs. Caldwell yielded to public opinion, and decided to deprive Jim of Beth's little income, and send Beth to school, some new enormities of Beth's having helped considerably to hasten her mother's decision.

Chapter XXIX

Mrs. Caldwell's married life had been one long sacrifice of herself, her health, her comfort, her every pleasure, to what she conceived to be right and dutiful. Duty and right were the only two words approaching to a religious significance that she was not ashamed to use; to her all the other words savoured of cant, and even these two she pronounced without emphasis or solemnity, lest the sense in which she used them might be mistaken for a piece of religiosity. Of the joy and gladness of religion the poor lady had no conception.

Nevertheless, as has already been said, Mrs. Caldwell was an admirable person, according to the light of her time. To us she appears to have been a good woman marred, first of all, by the narrow outlook, the ignorance and prejudices which were the result of the mental restrictions imposed upon her sex; secondly, by having no conception of her duty to herself; and finally, by those mistaken notions of her duty to others which were so long inflicted upon women, to be their own curse and the misfortune of all whom they were designed to benefit. She had sacrificed her health in her early married life to what she believed to be her duty as a wife, and so had left herself neither nerve nor strength enough for the never-ending tasks of the mistress of a household and mother of a family on a small income, the consequence of which was that shortness of temper and querulousness which spoilt her husband's life and made her own a burden to her. She was highly intelligent, but had carefully preserved her ignorance of life, because it was not considered womanly to have any practical knowledge of the world; and she had neglected the general cultivation of her mind partly because intellectual pursuits were a pleasure, and she did not feel sufficiently self-denying if she allowed herself any but exceptional pleasures, but also because there was a good deal of her husband's work in the way of letters and official documents that she could do for him, and these left her no time for anything but the inevitable making and mending. Busy men take a sensible amount of rest and relaxation, of food and fresh air, and make good speed; but busy women look upon outdoor exercise as a luxury, talk about wasting time on meals, and toil on incessantly yet with ever-diminishing strength, because they take no time to recoup; therefore they recede rather than advance; all the extra effort but makes for leeway.

The consequence of Mrs. Caldwell's ridiculous education was that her judgment was no more developed in most respects than it had been in her girlhood, so that when she lost her husband and had to act for her children, she had nothing better to rely on for her guidance than time-honoured conventions, which she accepted with unquestioning faith in their efficacy, even when applied to emergencies such as were never known in the earlier ages of human evolution to which they belonged. She had starved herself and her daughters in mind and body in order to scrape together the wherewithal to send her sons out into the world, but she had let them go without making any attempt to help them to form sound principles, or to teach them rules of conduct such as should keep them clean-hearted and make them worthy members of society; so that all her privation had been worse than vain, it had been mischievous; for the boys, unaided by any scheme or comprehensive view of life, any knowledge of the meaning of it to show them what was worth aiming at, and also unprotected by positive principles, had drifted along the commonest course of self-seeking and self-indulgence, and were neither a comfort nor a credit to her. However, she was satisfied that she had done her best for them, and therefore, being of the days when the woman's sphere was home exclusively, and home meant, for the most part, the nursery and the kitchen, she sat inactive and suffered, as was the wont of old-world women, while her sons were sinning all the sins which she especially should have taught them to abhor; and, with regard to her girls, she was equally satisfied that she had done the right thing by them under the circumstances. She could not have been made to comprehend that Beth, a girl, was the one member of the family who deserved a good chance, the only one for whom it would have repaid her to procure extra advantages; but having at last been convinced that there was nothing for it but to send Beth to school, she set to work to prepare her to the best of her ability. Her own clothes were in the last stage of shabbiness, but what money she had she spent on getting new ones for Beth, and that, too, in order that she might continue the allowance to Jim as long as possible. She made a mighty effort also to teach Beth all that was necessary for the entrance examination into the school, and sewed day and night to get the things ready--in all of which, be it said, Beth helped to the best of her ability, but without pride or pleasure, because she had been made to feel that she was robbing Jim, and that her mother was treating her better than she deserved, and the feeling depressed her, so that the much-longed-for chance, when it came, found her with less spirit than she had ever had to take advantage of it.

"Ah, Beth!" her mother said to her, seeing her so subdued, "I thought you would repent when it was too late. You won't find it so easy and delightful to have your own way as you suppose. When it comes to leaving home and going away among strangers who don't care a bit about you, you will not be very jubilant, I expect. You know what it is when Mildred leaves home, how she cries!"

"Summer showers, soft, warm, and refreshing," Beth snapped, irritated by the I-told-you-so tone of superiority, which, when her mother assumed it, always broke down her best resolutions, and threw her into a state of opposition. "Mildred the Satisfactory has the right thing ready for all occasions."

The result of this encounter was an elaborate pose. In dread of her mother's comments, should she betray the feeling expected of her, she set herself to maintain an unruffled calm of demeanour, whatever happened.

Autumn was tinting the woods when Beth packed up. The day before her departure she paid a round of visits, not to people, but to places, which shows how much more real the life of her musings was to her at that time than the life of the world. She got up at daybreak and went and sat on the rustic seat at the edge of the cliff where the stream fell over on to the sand, and thought of the first sunrise she had ever seen, and of the puritan farmer who had come out and reprimanded her ruggedly for being there alone at that unseemly hour. Poor man! His little house behind her was shut up and deserted, the garden he had kept so trim was all bedraggled, neglect ruled ruin all over his small demesne, and he himself was where the worthy rest till their return. The thought, however, at that hour and in that heavenly solitude, where there was no sound but the sea-voice which filled every pause in an undertone with the great song of eternity it sings on always, did not sadden Beth, but, on the contrary, stimulated her with some singular vague perception of the meaning of it all. The dawn was breaking, and the spirit of the dawn all about her possessed and drew her till she revelled in an ecstasy of yearning towards its crowning glory--Rise, Great Sun! When she first sat down, the hollow of the sky was one dark dome, only relieved by a star or two; but the darkness parted more rapidly than her eyes could appreciate, and was succeeded, in the hollow it had held, by rolling clouds monotonously grey, which, in turn, ranged themselves in long low downs, irregularly ribbed, and all unbroken, but gradually drawing apart until at length they were gently riven, and the first triumphant tinge of topaz colour, pale pink, warm and clear, like the faint flush that shyly betrays some delicate emotion on a young cheek, touched the soft gradations of the greyness to warmth and brightness, then mounted up and up in shafts to the zenith, while behind it was breathed in the tenderest tinge of turquoise blue, which shaded to green, which shaded to primrose low down on the horizon, where all was shining silver. Then, as the grey, so was the colour riven, and rays of light shot up, crimson flashes of flame, which, while Beth held her breath, were fast followed from the sea by the sun, that rose enwrapt in their splendour, while the water below caught the fine flush, and heaved and heaved like a breast expanding with delight into long deep sighs.

Beth cried aloud: "O Lord of Loveliness! how mighty are Thy manifestations!"

Later in the day she climbed to the top of the hill where Charlotte had kept her faithful watch for the dark-brown horse, and there, beneath the firs, she sat looking out, with large eyes straining far into the vague distance where Hector had been.

The ground was padded with pine-needles, briony berries shone in the hedgerows below, and hips and haws and rowans also rioted in red. Brambles were heavy with blue-black berries, and the bracken was battered and brown on the steep hill-side. Down in the road a team of four horses, dappled bays with black points and coats as glossy as satin, drawing a waggon of wheat, curved their necks and tossed their heads till the burnished brasses of their harness rang, and pacing with pride, as if they rejoiced to carry the harvest home. On the top of the wheat two women in coloured cotton frocks rested and sang--sang quite blithely.

Beth watched the waggon out of sight, then rose, and turning, faced the sea. As she descended the hill she left that dream behind her. Hector, like Sammy and Arthur, passed to the background of her recollections, where her lovers ceased from troubling, and the Secret Service of Humanity, superseded, was no more a living interest.

Beth went also to the farther sands to visit the spot where she had been surprised in the water by the girls, and had become the white priestess of their bathing rites, and taught that girls had a strength as great as the strength of boys, but different, if only they would do things. Mere mental and physical strength were what Beth was thinking of; she knew nothing of spiritual force, although she was using it herself at the time, and doing with it what all the boys in the diocese, taken together, could not have done. She had heard of works of the Spirit, and that she should pray to be imbued with it; but that she herself was pure spirit, only waiting to be released from her case of clay, had never been hinted to her.

The next day she travelled with her mother from the north to the south, and during the whole long journey there was no break in the unruffled calm of her demeanour. Her mother wondered at her, and was irritated, and fussed about the luggage, and fumed about trains she feared to miss; but Beth kept calm. She sat in her corner of the carriage looking out of the window, and the world was a varied landscape, to every beauty of which she was keenly alive, yet she gave no expression to her enthusiasm, nor to the discomfort she suffered from the August sun, which streamed in on her through the blindless window, burning her face for hours, nor to her hunger and fatigue; and when at last they came to the great house by the river, and her mother, having handed her over to Miss Clifford, the lady principal, said, somewhat tearfully, "Good-bye, Beth! I hope you will be happy here. But be a good girl." Beth answered, "Thank you. I shall try, mamma," and kissed her as coolly as if it were her usual good-night.

"We do not often have young ladies part from their mothers so placidly," Miss Clifford commented.

"I suppose not," Mrs. Caldwell said, sighing.

Beth felt that she was behaving horridly. There was a lump in her throat, and she would liked to have shown more feeling, but she could not. Now, when she would have laid aside the mask of calmness which she had voluntarily assumed, she found herself forced to wear it. Falsifications of our better selves are easily entered upon, but hard to shake off. They are evil things that lurk about us, ready but powerless to come till we call them; but, having been called, they hold us in their grip, and their power upon us to compel us becomes greater than ours upon them.

Mrs. Caldwell felt sore at heart when she had gone, and Beth was not less sore. Each had been a failure in her relation to the other. Mrs. Caldwell blamed Beth, and Beth, in her own mind, did not defend herself. She forbore to judge.

Chapter XXX

St. Catherine's Mansion, the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters, had not been built for the purpose, but bought, otherwise it would have been as ugly to look at as it was dreary to live in. As it was, however, the house was beautiful, and so also were the grounds about it, and the views of the river, the bridge with its many arches, and the grey town climbing up from it to the height above.

Beth was still standing at the top of the steps under the great portico, where her mother had left her, contemplating the river, which was the first that had flowed into her experience.

"Come, come, my dear, come in!" some one behind her exclaimed impatiently. "You're not allowed to stand there."

Beth turned and saw a thin, dry, middle-aged woman, with keen dark eyes and a sharp manner, standing in the doorway behind her, with a gentler-looking lady, who said, "It is a new girl, Miss Bey. I expect she is all bewildered."

"No, I am not at all bewildered, thank you," Beth answered in her easy way. As she spoke she saw two grown-up girls in the hall exchange glances and smile, and wondered what unusual thing she had done.

"Then you had better come at once," Miss Bey rejoined drily, "and let me see what you can do. Please to remember in future that the girls are not allowed to come to this door."

She led the way as she spoke, and Beth followed her across the hall, up a broad flight of steps opposite the entrance, down a wide corridor to the right, and then to the right again, into a narrow class-room, and through that again into another inner room.

"These are the fifth and sixth rooms," Miss Bey remarked,--"fifth and sixth classes."

They were furnished with long bare tables, forms, hard wooden chairs, a cupboard, and a set of pigeon-holes. Miss Bey sat down at the end of the table in the "sixth," with her back to the window, and made Beth sit on her left. There were some books, a large slate, a slate pencil, and damp sponge on the table.

"What arithmetic have you done?" Miss Bey began.

"I've scrambled through the first four rules," Beth answered.

"Set yourself a sum in each, and do it," Miss Bey said sharply, taking a piece of knitting from a bag she held on her arm, and beginning to knit in a determined manner, as if she were working against time.

Beth took up the slate and pencil, and began; but the sharp click-click of the needles worried her, and her brain was so busy studying Miss Bey she could not concentrate her mind upon the sums.

Miss Bey waited without a word, but Beth was conscious of her keen eyes fixed upon her from time to time, and knew what she meant.

"I'm hurrying all I can," she said at last.

"You'll have to hurry more than you can, then, in class," Miss Bey remarked, "if this is your ordinary rate of work."

When the sums were done, she took the slate and glanced over them. "They are every one wrong," she said; "but I see you know how to work them. Now clean the slate, and do some dictation."

She took up a book when Beth was ready, and began to read aloud from it. Beth became so interested in the subject that she forgot the dictation, and burst out at last, "Well, I never knew that before."

"You are doing dictation now," Miss Bey observed severely.

"All right, go on," Beth cheerfully rejoined.

Miss Bey did not go on, however, and on looking up to see what was the matter, Beth found her gazing at her with bent brows.

"May I ask what your name is?" Miss Bey inquired.

"Beth Caldwell."

"Then allow me to inform you, Miss Beth Caldwell, that 'all right, go on,' is not the proper way to address the head-mistress of the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters."

"Thank you for telling me," Beth answered. "You see I don't know these things. I always say that to mamma."

"Have you ever been to school before?" Miss Bey asked.

"No," Beth answered.

"Oh!" Miss Bey ejaculated, with peculiar meaning. "Then you will have a great deal to learn."

"I suppose so," Beth rejoined. "But that's what I came for, you know--to learn. It's high time I began!"

She fixed her big eyes on the blank wall opposite, and there was a sorrowful expression in them. Miss Bey noted the expression, and nodded her head several times, but there was no relaxation of her peremptory manner when she spoke again.

"Go on, my dear," she said. "If I give as much time to the others as you are taking, I shall not get through the new girls to-night."

Beth finished her dictation.

"What a hand!" Miss Bey exclaimed. "Wherever did you learn to write like that?"

"I taught myself to write small on purpose," Beth replied. "You can get so much more on to the paper."

"You had better have taught yourself to spell, then," Miss Bey rejoined. "There are four mistakes in this one passage."

Beth balanced her pencil on her finger with an air of indifference. She was wondering how it was that the head-mistress of the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters used the word "wherever" as the vulgar do.

The examination concluded with some questions in history and geography, which Beth answered more or less incorrectly.

"I shall put you here in the sixth," Miss Bey informed her; "but rather for your size than for your acquirements. There is a delicate girl, much smaller than you are, in the first."

"Then I'd rather be myself, tall and strong, in the sixth," Beth rejoined. "If I don't catch her up, at all events I shall have more pleasure in life, and that's something."

Again Miss Bey gazed at her; but she was too much taken aback by Beth's readiness to correct her on the instant, although it was an unaccustomed and a monstrous thing for a girl to address a mistress in an easy conversational way, let alone differ from her.

She took Beth to the great class-room where the seventh and eighth worked, and the fifth and sixth joined them for recreation and preparation, and where also the Bible lessons were given by Miss Clifford to the whole school.

There were a good many girls of various ages in the room, who all looked up.

"This is a new girl," Miss Bey said, addressing them generally,--"Miss Beth Caldwell. Please to show her where to go and what to do."

She glanced round keenly as she spoke, then left the room; and at the same time a thin, sharp-looking little girl with short hair rose from the table at which she was sitting and went up to Beth.

"I'm head of the fifth," she said. "Has Bey been examining you? What class did she put you in?"

"The sixth," Beth said.

"I should have thought you'd have been in the third at least," the head of the fifth piped, "you're so big. Here are some sixth girls--Jessie Baker, Ina Formby, Rosa Bird."

The sixth girls were sitting at a round table, with their little desks before them, writing letters. One of them pulled out a chair for Beth. They had just returned from the holidays, and were in various stages of home-sickness--some of them crying, and the rest depressed; but they welcomed Beth kindly, as one of themselves, and inspected her with interest.

"You can write a private letter to-day, you know," Rosa Bird said to Beth.

"What is a private letter?" Beth asked.

"One to your mother, you know, that isn't read. You seal it up yourself. Public letters have to be sent in open to Miss Clifford. One week you write a public letter, and the next a private one. Hello! here's Amy Wynne!"

A dark girl of about eighteen had entered by a door at the farther end of the room, and was received with acclamation, being evidently popular. Beth, who was still in her mask of calm indifference, looked coldly on, but in herself she determined to be received like that some day.

Most of the girls in the room jumped up, and Amy Wynne kissed one after the other, and then shook hands with Beth.

"Are all my children back?" she asked.

"I don't know," Rosa Bird rejoined, glancing round. "They are not all here."

"That's one of the mothers," Rosa explained to Beth when Amy Wynne had gone again. "The first-class girls are mothers to us. You walk with your mother in the garden, and sit with her on half-holidays, and she's awfully good to you. I advise you to be one of Amy Wynne's children if you can." She was interrupted by the loud ringing of a bell in the hall. "That's for tea," Rosa added. "Come, and I'll show you the way."

The big dining-room was downstairs in the basement, next the kitchen. Miss Clifford dined in the next room attended by her maids of honour (the two girls at the top of the first class for the time being) and the rest of the class except the girls at the bottom, who were degraded to the second-class table in the big dining-room. Here each two classes had a separate table, at either end of which a teacher sat on a Windsor chair. The girls had nothing but hard benches without backs to sit on. Miss Bey, the housekeeper Miss Winch, and the head music-mistress, irreverently called Old Tom by the girls, sat at a separate table, where, at dinner-time, they did all the carving, and snatched what little dinner they could get in the intervals, patiently and foolishly regardless of their own digestions. For tea there were great dishes of thick bread and butter on all the tables, which the girls began to hand round as soon as grace had been said. Each class had a big basin of brown sugar to put in the tea, which gave it a coarse flavour. The first cup was not so bad, but the second was nothing but hot water poured through the teapot. It was not etiquette to take more than two. When the girls were ready for a second, they put pieces of bread in their saucers that they might know their own again, and passed the cups up to the teacher who poured out tea. If any girl suspected that the cup returned to her was not her own, she would not touch the tea. When the meal was over, one of the girls took the sugar-basin, beat down the sugar in it flat and hard with the spoon, did a design on the top, and put it away.

"What's that for?" Beth asked.

"That's so that we shall know our own again," Rosa answered. "But it never lasts the proper time."

"What do you do when it's done?" said Beth.

"Do without," was the laconic rejoinder.

All the girls were talking at once.

"What a racket!" Beth exclaimed.

"It'll be quiet enough to-morrow," Rosa replied. "The first class talks at table in Miss Clifford's room, but we are not allowed to speak a word here, except to the teachers, nor in the bedrooms either, once work begins. Do you see that great fat old thing at the mistress's table? That's Old Tom, the head music-mistress. She is a greedy old cat! She likes eating! You can see it by the way she gloats over things, and she's quite put out if she doesn't get exactly what she wants. Fancy caring! It's just like a man; and that's why she's called Old Tom."

"Not that she's fastidious!" said Agnes Stewart, a tall slender girl with short crisp black hair and grey-green eyes, who was sitting opposite to Beth. "I believe she likes mutton."

"Oh, she's horrid enough for anything!" the girl next her exclaimed with an expression of disgust.

Some of the girls ate their thick bread and butter unconcernedly, others were choked with tears, and could not touch it. Most of the tearful ones were new girls, and the old ones were kind to them; the teachers, too, were sympathetic, and did their best to cheer them.

After tea they all returned to their class-rooms. Beth went and stood in one of the great windows looking out on to the grounds, the river, the old arched bridge, and the grey houses of the town climbing up the hill among the autumn-tinted trees. All the windows were shut, and she began to feel suffocated for want of fresh air, and bewildered by the clatter of voices. If only she could get out into the garden! The door at the end of the room, which led into the first and second, was open. She went through. But before she was half across the room, one of the elder girls exclaimed roughly, "Hello! what are you doing here?"

"It's a new girl, Inkie," another put in.

"Well, the sooner she learns she has no business here the better," Inkie rejoined.

Beth thought her exceedingly rude, and passed on into the vestibule unconcernedly.

"Well, that's cool cheek!" Inkie exclaimed.

"Hie--you--new girl! come back here directly, and go round the other way, just to teach you manners."

Beth turned back with flaming cheeks, looked at her hard a moment.

"That for your manners!" she said, snapping her fingers at her.

Amy Wynne rose from her seat and went up to Beth. "You must learn at once, Miss Caldwell," she said, "that you will not be allowed to speak to the elder girls like that."

"Then the elder girls had better learn at once," said Beth defiantly, "that they will not be allowed to speak to me as your Inkie-person did just now. You'll not teach me manners by being rude to me; and if any girl in the school is ever rude to me again, I'll box her ears. Now, I apologise for coming through your room, but you should keep the door shut."

When she had spoken, she returned to the big class-room deliberately, and crossed it to the other door. As she did so, she noticed that a strange hush had fallen upon the girls, and they were all looking at her curiously. She went into the hall, and was passing the vestibule door, when Miss Bey, who was sitting just inside knitting, stopped her.

"Where are you going, Miss Caldwell?" she asked in her sharp way.

"Upstairs," Beth answered.

"You speak shortly, Miss Caldwell. It would have been more polite to have mentioned my name."

"I beg your pardon, Miss Bey," Beth rejoined.

Miss Bey bowed with a severe smile in acknowledgment of the apology. "What do you want upstairs?" she asked.

"To be alone," Beth answered. "I can't stand the noise."

"You must stand the noise," said Miss Bey. "Girls are not allowed to go upstairs without some very good reason; and they must always ask permission--politely--from the teacher on duty. I am the teacher on duty at this moment. If you had gone upstairs without permission, I should have given you a bad mark."

Beth looked longingly at the hall door, which had glass panels in the upper part, through which she could see the river and the trees. "What a prison this is!" she exclaimed.

Miss Bey had had great experience of girls, and her sharp manner, which was mainly acquired in the effort to maintain discipline, somewhat belied her kindly nature.

"You can bring a chair from the hall, and sit here beside me, if you like," she said to Beth.

"Thank you," Beth answered. "This is better," she said when she was seated. "May I talk to you?"

"Yes, certainly," said Miss Bey.

There was a great conservatory behind them as they sat looking into the hall; on their left was the third and fourth class-room, on their right the first and second; the doors of both stood open.

"Did you hear the row I had in there just now?" Beth asked, nodding towards the first and second.

"I did," said Miss Bey. "But you mustn't say 'row,' it is vulgar."

"Difficulty, then," Beth rejoined. "But what did you think of it?"

Miss Bey reflected. The question as Beth put it was not easy to answer. "I thought you were both very much in the wrong," she said at last.

"Well, that is fair, at all events," Beth observed with approval. "I don't mean to break any of your rules when I know what they are, and I bet you I won't have a bad mark, if there's any way to help it, the whole time I am at school; but I'm not going to be sat upon by anybody."

Miss Bey pursed up her mouth and knitted emphatically. She was accustomed to naughty girls, but the most troublesome stood in awe of the teachers.

"My dear," she said, after a little pause, "I honour your good resolutions; but I must request you not to say 'I'll bet,' or talk about 'being sat upon.' Both expressions are distinctly unladylike. I must also tell you that at school the teachers are not on the same level as the girls; they are in authority, you see."

"I see," said Beth. "I spoke to you as one lady might speak to another. I won't again, Miss Bey."

Miss Bey paused once more, with bent brows, to reflect upon this ambiguous announcement; but not being able to make anything of it, she proceeded: "It is a matter of discipline. Without strict discipline an establishment of this size would be in a state of chaos. The girls must respect the teachers, and the younger girls must respect the elder ones. All become elder ones in turn, and are respected."

"Well, I mean to be respected all through," Beth declared, and set her mouth hard on the determination.

At eight o'clock Miss Bey rang a big handbell for prayers, and the whole household, including the servants, came trooping into the hall. The girls sat together in their classes, and, when all were in their places, Miss Clifford came in attended by her maids-of-honour, mounted the reading-desk, and read the little service in a beautiful voice devoutly. Beth softened as she listened, and joined in with all her heart towards the end.

When prayers were over, and the servants had gone downstairs, one of the maids-of-honour set a chair under the domed ceiling in front of the vestibule for Miss Clifford, who went to it from the reading-desk, and sat there. Then the first-class girls rose and left their seats in single file, and each as she passed walked up to Miss Clifford, took the hand which she held out, and curtsied good-night to her. The other classes followed in the same order. Miss Clifford said a word or two to some of the girls, and had a smile for all. When Beth's turn came, she made an awkward curtsey in imitation of the others. Miss Clifford held her hand a moment, and looked up into her face keenly; then smiled, and let her go. Beth felt that there was some special thought behind that smile, and wondered what it was. Miss Clifford made it her duty to know the character, temper, constitution, and capacity of every one of the eighty girls under her, and watched carefully for every change in them. This good-night, which was a dignified and impressive ceremony, gave her an opportunity of inspecting each girl separately every day, and very little escaped her. If a girl looked unhappy, run down, overworked, or otherwise out of sorts, Miss Clifford sent for her next morning to find out what was the matter; and she was scolded, comforted, put on extras, had a tonic to take, or was allowed another hour in bed in the morning, according to the necessities of her case.

The girls who were in certain bedrooms sat up an hour after prayers, and had dry bread and water for supper; they turned to the left and went back to their class-rooms when they had made their curtseys. The others turned to the right and went upstairs. Beth was one of these. She was in No. 6. There were several beds in the room, and beside each bed was a washstand, and a box for clothes. The floor was carpetless. There were white curtains hung on iron rods to be drawn round the beds and the space beside them, so that each girl had perfect privacy to dress and undress. The curtains were all drawn back for air when the girls were ready, but no girl drew her curtain without the permission of the girl next to her. When a bell rang, they all knelt down, and had ten minutes for private prayers night and morning, the bell being rung again when the time was up. The girls had to turn down their beds to air them before they left their rooms in the morning. They had an hour's lessons before breakfast, then prayers. After prayers the monitresses rose from their seats below the reading-desk, and, as they filed out, each in turn reported if any one had spoken or not spoken in the bedrooms. Breakfast consisted of thick bread and butter and tea for the girls, with the addition of an insufficient quantity of fried bacon for the teachers. After breakfast the girls went upstairs again and made their beds in a given time; then all but a few, who were kept in for music, went out into the garden for half-an-hour. Beth had to go out that first morning. The sun was shining, bright drops sparkled on grass and trees, the air was heavy with autumn odours, but fresh and sweet, and the birds chirped blithely. Beth felt like a free creature once more directly she got out, and, throwing up her arms with a great exclamation of relief after the restraint indoors, she ran out on to the wide grass-plot in front of the house at the top of her speed.

"Come back, come back, new girl!" cried the head French mistress, Mademoiselle Duval, the teacher on duty. "You are not allowed to go on the grass, nor must you run in that unseemly way."

"I'm sorry," said Beth. "I didn't know."

She moved off on to the path which overlooked the river, and began to walk soberly up and down, gazing at the water.

"Mademoiselle!" the French mistress screamed again shrilly, "come away from there! The girls are not allowed to walk on that path."

"Oh dear!" said Beth. "Where may I go?"

"Just go where you see the other girls go," Mademoiselle rejoined sharply.

Not being a favourite, the French mistress was left to wander about alone. Popular teachers always had some girls hanging on to their arms out in the garden, and sitting with them when they were on duty indoors; but Mademoiselle seldom had a satellite, and never one who was respected. The girls thought her deceitful, and deceit was one of the things not tolerated in the school. Miss Bey was believed to be above deceit of any kind, and was liked and respected accordingly in spite of her angular appearance, sharp manner, the certainty that she was not a lady by birth, and the suspicion that her father kept a shop. The girls had certain simple tests of character and station. They attend more to each other's manners in the matter of nicety at girls' schools than at boys', more's the pity for those who have to live with the boys afterwards. If a new girl drank with her mouth full, ate audibly, took things from the end instead of the side of a spoon, or bit her bread instead of breaking it at dinner, she was set down as nothing much at home, which meant that her people were socially of no importance, not to say common; and if she were not perfectly frank and honest, or if she ever said coarse or indelicate things, she was spoken of contemptuously as a dockyard girl, which meant one of low mind and objectionable manners, who was in a bad set at home and made herself cheap after the manner of a garrison hack, the terms being nearly equivalent. There was no pretence of impossible innocence among the elder girls, but neither was there any impropriety of language or immodesty of conduct. Certain subjects were avoided, and if a girl made any allusion to them by chance, she was promptly silenced; if she recurred to them persistently, she was set down at once as a dockyard girl and an outsider. The consequence of this high standard was an extremely good tone all through the school.

Beth turned into the lime-tree avenue, where she met several sets of girls all walking in rows with their arms round each other. None of them took any notice of her, until she got out on to the drive, where she met Amy Wynne with her children. Amy let go the two she had her arms round, sent them all on, and stopped to speak to Beth.

"Have you no mother?" she asked.

"I have one at home," Beth answered coldly in spite of herself.

"But you know our custom here," Amy rejoined. "The elder girls are mothers to the young ones."

"I know," said Beth, "but I don't want a mother. I should hate to have my thoughts interrupted by a lot of little girls in a row, all cackling together."

"I was going to offer," Amy began, "but, of course, if you are so self-reliant, it would only be an impertinence."

"Oh no!" said Beth, sincerely regretting her own ungraciousness. "It is kind of you, and if it were you alone, I should be glad, but I could not stand the others."

"Well, I hope you won't be lonely," Amy answered, and hurried on after her children.

"Lonely I must be," Beth muttered to herself with sudden foreboding.

When the girls went in, Beth was summoned to the big music-room. "Old Tom" was there with Dr. Centry, who came twice a week to hear the girls play. There were twelve pianos in the room, ten upright and two grand, besides Old Tom's own private grand, all old, hard, and metallic; and twelve girls hammered away on them, all together, at the same piece; but if one made a mistake, Old Tom instantly detected it, and knew which it was.

"Do ye know any music?" she asked Beth in a gruff voice with a rough Scotch accent.

"A little," Beth answered.

"What, for instance?" Old Tom pursued, looking at Beth as if she were a culprit up for judgment.

"Some of Chopin," Beth replied. "I like him best."

Old Tom raised her eyebrows incredulously. "Sit down here and play one of his compositions, if you please--here, at my piano," she said, opening the instrument.

But Beth felt intimidated for once, partly by the offensive manners of the formidable-looking old woman, her bulk and gruffness, but also because Old Tom's doubt of her powers, which she perceived, was shaking her confidence. She sat down at the piano, however, and struck a few notes; then her nerve forsook her.

"I can't play," she said. "I'm nervous."

"Humph!" snarled Old Tom. "I thought that 'ud be your Chopin! Go and learn exercises with the children in Miss Tait's class-room."

Miss Tait, acting on Old Tom's report, put Beth into one of her lower classes, and left her to practise with the beginners. When she had gone, Beth glanced at the exercises, and then began to rattle them off at such a rate that no one in the class could keep up with her. Miss Tait came hurrying back.

"Who is that playing so fast?" she said. "Was it you, Miss Caldwell?"

"Yes," Beth answered.

"Then you must go into a higher class," said Miss Tait.

But the same thing happened in every class until at last Beth had run up through them all, as up a flight of stairs, into Old Tom's first. Her piano in the first, when the whole class was present and she had no choice, was a hard old instrument, usually avoided because it was the nearest to the table at which Old Tom sat (when she did not walk about) during a lesson. The first time Beth took her place at it, the other girls were only beginning to assemble, and Old Tom was not in the room. A great teasing of instruments, as Old Tom called it, was going on. A new piece was to be taken that morning, and each girl began to try it as soon as she sat down, so that they were all at different passages. They stopped, however, and looked up when Beth appeared.

"That's your piano," the head girl said.

"I hope you'll like it!" one of the others added sarcastically.

"Oh, but I'm glad to be here!" said Beth, striking a few firm chords. "Now I feel like Chopin," and she burst out into one of his most brilliant waltzes triumphantly.

Old Tom had come in while she was speaking, but Beth did not see her. Old Tom waited till she had done.

"Oh, so now ye feel like Chopin, Miss Caldwell," she jeered. "And it appears ye are not above shamming nervous when it suits ye to mak' yerself interesting. I shall remember that."

Old Tom taught by a series of jeers and insults. If a girl were poor, she never failed to remind her of the fact. "But, indeed, ye're beggars all," was her favourite summing up when they stumbled at troublesome passages. Most of the girls cowered under her insults, but Beth looked her straight in the face at this second encounter, and at the third her spirit rose and she argued the point. Old Tom tried to shout her down, but Beth left her seat, and suggested that they should go and get Miss Clifford to decide between them. Then Old Tom subsided, and from that time she and Beth were on amicable terms.

Beth had an excellent musical memory when she went to school, but she lost it entirely whilst she was there, and the delicacy of her touch as well; both being destroyed, as she supposed, by the system of practising with so many others at a time, which made it impossible for her to feel what she was playing or put any individuality of expression into it.

On that opening day, Beth had to go from the music-room to her first English lesson in the sixth. All the girls sat round the long narrow table, Miss Smallwood, the mistress, being at the end, with her back to the window. The lesson was "Guy," a collection of questions and answers, used also by the first-class girls, only that they were farther on in the book. Who was William the Conqueror? When did he arrive? What did he do on landing? and so on. Beth, at the bottom of the class on Miss Smallwood's right, was in a good position to ask questions herself. She could have told the whole history of William the Conqueror in her own language after once reading it over; but the answers to the questions had to be learnt by heart and repeated in the exact language of the book, and in the struggle to be word-perfect enough to keep up with the class, the significance of what she was saying was lost upon her. It was her mother's system exactly, and Beth was disappointed, having hoped for something different These pillules of knowledge only exasperated her; she wanted enough to enable her to grasp the whole situation.

"What is the use of learning these little bits by heart about William the Conqueror and the battle of Hastings, and all that, Miss Smallwood?" she exclaimed one day.

"It is a part of your education, Beth," Miss Smallwood answered precisely.

"I know," Beth grumbled, "but couldn't one read about it, and get on a little quicker? I want to know what he did when he got here."

"Why, my dear child, how can you be so stupid? You have just said he fought the battle of Hastings."

"Yes, but what did the battle of Hastings do?" Beth persisted, making a hard but ineffectual effort to express herself.

"Oh, now, Beth, you are silly!" Miss Smallwood rejoined impatiently, and all the girls grinned in agreement. But it was not Beth who was silly. Miss Smallwood had had nothing herself but the trumpery education provided everywhere at that time for girls by the part of humanity which laid undisputed claim to a superior sense of justice, and it had not carried her far enough to enable her to grasp any more comprehensive result of the battle of Hastings than was given in the simple philosophy of Guy. Most of the girls at the Royal Service School would have to work for themselves, and teaching was almost the only occupation open to them, yet such education as they received, consisting as it did of mere rudiments, was an insult to the high average of intelligence that obtained amongst them. They were not taught one thing thoroughly, not even their own language, and remained handicapped to the end of their lives for want of a grounding in grammar. When you find a woman's diction at fault, never gird at her for want of intelligence, but at those in authority over her in her youth, who thought anything in the way of education good enough for a girl. Even the teachers at St. Catherine's, some of them, wrote in reply to invitations, "I shall have much pleasure in accepting." The girls might be there eight years, but were never taught French enough in the time either to read or speak it correctly. Their music was an offence to the ear, and their drawings to the eye. History was given to them in outlines only, which isolated kings and their ministers, showing little or nothing of their influence on the times they lived in, and ignoring the condition of the people, who were merely introduced as a background to some telling incident in the career of a picturesque personage; and everything else was taught in the same superficial way--except religion. But the fact that the religious education was good in Beth's time was an accident due to Miss Clifford's character and capacity, and therefore no credit to the governors of the school, who did not know that she was specially qualified in that respect when they made her Lady Principal. She was a high-minded woman, Low Church, of great force of character and exemplary piety, and her spirit pervaded the whole school. She gave the Bible lessons herself in the form of lectures which dealt largely with the conduct of life; and as she had the power to make her subject interesting, and the faith which carries conviction, both girls and mistresses profited greatly by her teaching. Many of them became deeply religious under her, and most of them had phases of piety; whilst there were very few who did not leave the school with yearnings at least towards honour and uprightness, which were formed by time and experience into steady principles.

Beth persisted in roaming the garden alone. She loved to hover about a large fountain there, with a deep wide basin round it, in which gold-fish swam and water-lilies grew. She used to go and hang over it, peering into the water, or, when the fountain played, she would loiter near, delighting in the sound of it, the splash and murmur.

One of the windows of Miss Clifford's sitting-room overlooked this part of the garden, and Beth noticed the old lady once or twice standing in the window, but it did not occur to her that she was watching her. One day, however, Miss Clifford sent a maid-of-honour to fetch her; and Beth went in, wondering what she had done, but asked no questions; calm indifference was still her pose.

Miss Clifford dismissed the maid-of-honour. She was sitting in her own special easy-chair, and Beth stood before her.

"My dear child," she said to Beth, "why are you always alone? Are the girls not kind to you?"

"Oh yes, thank you," Beth answered, "they are quite kind."

"Then why are you always alone?"

"I like it best."

"Are you sure," said Miss Clifford, "that the others do not shun you for some reason or other?"

"One of them wished to be my mother," Beth rejoined, "but I did not care about it."

"But you cannot be happy always alone like that," Miss Clifford observed.

Beth was silent.

Miss Clifford looked at her earnestly for a little, then she shook her head.

"I tell you what I will do if you like, Miss Clifford," Beth said upon reflection. "I will form a family of my own."

Miss Clifford smiled. "Ah! I see you are ambitious," she said, "but, my dear child, a sixth girl can't expect to have that kind of influence."

"It is not ambition," Beth answered, "for I shall feel it no distinction, only a great bother. Nevertheless, I will do it to show you that I am not shunned; and to please you, as you do not like me to wander alone."

A week or two later Beth appeared in the garden with six of the worst girls in the school clinging to her, fascinated by her marvellous talk.

Miss Clifford sent for her again. "I am sorry to see you in such company," she said. "Those girls are all older than you are, and they will lead you into mischief."

"On the contrary, Miss Clifford," Beth replied, "I shall keep them out of mischief. Not one of them has had a bad mark this week."

Then Miss Clifford sent for Miss Smallwood, the mistress of the sixth. "What do you make of Beth Caldwell?" she asked.

"I can't make anything of her," Miss Smallwood answered. "I think she tries, but she does not seem able to keep up with the other girls at all. She seldom knows a lesson or does a sum correctly. I sometimes think she ought to be in the eighth. But then occasionally she shows a knowledge far beyond her years; not a knowledge of school work, but of books and life."

"How about her themes?"

"I don't know what to think of them; they are too good. But she declares emphatically that she does them all out of her own head."

"What sort of temper has she?"

"Queer, like everything else about her. Not unamiable, you know, but irritable at times, and she has days of deep depression, and moments of extreme elation."

"Ah!" Miss Clifford ejaculated, and then reflected a little. "Well, be patient with her," she said at last. "If she hasn't exceptional ability of some kind, I am no judge of girls; but she is evidently unaccustomed to school work, and is suffering from the routine and restraint, after being allowed to run wild. She should have been sent here years ago."

Chapter XXXI

From the foregoing it will be seen that Beth made her mark upon the school from the day of her arrival in the way of getting herself observed and talked about. She was set down as queer to begin with, and when lessons began both girls and mistresses decided that she was stupid; and queer she remained to the end in the estimation of those who had no better word to express it, but with regard to her stupidity there soon began to be differences of opinion.

At preparation one evening she talked instead of doing her work, and gradually all the girls about her had stopped to listen.

"Gracious!" Beth exclaimed at last, "the bell will go directly, and I've not done a sum. Show me how to work them, Rosa."

"Oh, bother!" Rosa rejoined. "Find out for yourself! My theme was turned, and I've got to do it again."

"Look here," said Beth, "if you'll do my sums, I'll do your theme now, and your thorough bass on Thursday."

"I wish to goodness you wouldn't talk, Beth!" Agnes Stewart exclaimed. "We shall all get bad marks to-morrow."

"Then why do you listen?" Beth retorted.

"I can't help it," Agnes grumbled. "You fascinate me. I should have thought you were clever if I had only heard you talk, and not known what a duffer you are at your lessons."

"Well, she's not a duffer at thorough bass anyway," Rosa put in. "She only began this term, and she's a long way ahead even of some of the first. Old Tom's given her a little book to herself."

"I began thorough bass with the rest of you," Beth observed. "It's the only thing we started fair in. You are years ahead of me in all the other work."

The girls reflected upon this for a little.

"And you can write themes," Rosa finally asseverated.

"Oh, that's nothing," Beth protested. "Themes are easy enough. I could write them for the whole school."

"Well, that's no reason why you should put your nose in your cup every time you drink," Lucy Black, the sharpest shrimp of a girl in the class, said, grinning.

"I never did such a thing in my life," Beth exclaimed, turning crimson. "You'll say I eat audibly next."

"No, you don't do that," Rosa said solemnly; "but you do put your nose in your cup."

The colour flickered on Beth's sensitive cheek, and she shrank into herself.

"There, don't tease her!" Mary Wright, the eldest, stupidest, and most motherly girl in the school, exclaimed. "How can you drink without putting your nose in your cup, stupid?"

Then Beth saw it and smiled, greatly relieved. This venerable pleasantry was a sign that she had been taken once for all into the good graces of her schoolmates. The girls who were liked were usually nicknamed and always chaffed; the rest were treated with different degrees of politeness, the dockyard girls, as the lowest of all, being called miss, even by the teachers.

On Thursday evenings the girls in the fifth and sixth were allowed to do fancy work for an hour while a story-book was read aloud to them, either by Miss Smallwood or one of themselves when her voice was tired. The book was always either childish or dull, generally both, and Beth, who had been accustomed to Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray, grew restive under the infliction. One evening when she had twice been reprimanded for yawning aggressively, she exclaimed, "Well, Miss Smallwood, it is such silly stuff! Why, I could tell you a better story myself, and make it up as I go on."

"Then begin at once and tell it," said Miss Smallwood, glancing round at the girls, who smiled derisively, thinking that Beth would have to excuse herself and thereby tacitly acknowledge that she had been boasting. To their surprise, however, Beth took the request seriously, settled herself in her chair, folded her hands, and, with her eyes roaming about the room as if she were picking up the details from the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and all it contained, started without hesitation. It was the romantic story of a haunted house on a great rocky promontory, and the freshness and sound of the sea pervaded it. The girls went on with their work for a little, but by degrees first one and then another stopped, and just sat staring at Beth, while gravity settled on every face as the interest deepened.

Suddenly the bell rang, and the story was not finished.

"Oh dear!" Miss Smallwood exclaimed, "it is very fascinating, Beth; but I really am afraid I ought not to have allowed you to tell it. I had no idea--I must speak to Miss Clifford."

The fame of this wonderful story spread through the school, and the next half-holiday the first-class girls sent to ask Beth to go to their room and repeat it; but Beth was not in the mood, and answered their messenger tragically:--

"'Twas not for this I left my father's home! Go, tell your class, that Vashti will not come."

"Vashti's a little beast, I think," the head girl observed when the message was delivered.

Miss Clifford also sent for Beth, and requested her to repeat the story, that she might judge for herself if she should be allowed to go on with it; and Beth repeated it, being constrained; but the recital was so wearisome that Miss Clifford dismissed her before she was half-way through, with leave to finish it if anybody cared to hear it. When Thursday came, the girls and Miss Smallwood cared very much to hear it, and Beth, stimulated by their clamours, went on without a break for the whole hour, and ended with a description of a shipwreck, which was so vivid that the whole class was shaken with awe, and sat silent for a perceptible time after she stopped.

Beth could rarely be persuaded to repeat this performance; but from that time her standing was unique, both with girls and mistresses, a fact, however, of which she herself was totally unaware. She felt her backwardness in school work and nothing else, and petitioned God incessantly to help her with her lessons, and get her put up; and put up she was regularly until she reached the third, when she was among the elder girls. She was never able to do the work properly of any class she was in, however, and her class mistresses were always against her being put up, but Miss Clifford insisted on it.

Beth was never anything but miserable at school. The dull routine of the place pressed heavily upon her, and everything she had to do was irksome. The other girls accommodated themselves more or less successfully to the circumstances of their lives; but Beth in herself was always at war with her surroundings, and her busy brain teemed with ingenious devices to vary the monotony. The confinement, want of relaxation, and of proper physical training, very soon told upon her health and spirits, as indeed they did upon the greater number of the girls, who suffered unnecessarily in various ways. Beth very soon had to have an extra hour in bed in the morning, a cup of soup at eleven o'clock, a tonic three times a day, and a slice of thick bread and butter with a glass of stout on going to bed; such things were not stinted during Miss Clifford's administration; but it was a case of treating effects which all the time were being renewed by causes that might and ought to have been removed, but were let alone.

St. Catherine's Mansion was regulated on a system of exemplary dulness. There is a certain dowager still extant who considers it absurd to provide amusement for people of inferior station. All people who earn their living are people of inferior station to her; she has never heard of such a thing as the dignity of labour. Because many of the girls at St. Catherine's were orphans without means, and would therefore have to earn their own living as governesses when their education was finished, the dowager-persons who interested themselves in the management of the school had used their influence strenuously to make the life there as much of a punishment as possible. "You cannot be too strict with girls in their position," was what they continually averred, their own position by birth being in no way better, and in some instances not so good, as that of the girls whom they were depriving of every innocent pleasure natural to their age and necessary for the good of their health and spirits. They were not allowed to learn dancing; they had no outdoor games at all, not even croquet--nothing whatever to exhilarate them and develop them physically except an hour's "deportment," the very mildest kind of calisthenics, in the big class-room once a fortnight, and the daily making of their little beds. For the rest, monotonous walks up and down the garden-paths in small parties, or about the dreary roads two and two in long lines, was their only exercise, and even in this they were restricted to such a severe propriety of demeanour that it almost seemed as if the object were to teach them to move without betraying the fact that they had legs. The consequence of all this restraint was a low state of vitality among the girls, and the outbreak of morbid phases that sometimes went right through the school. Beth, as might have been expected, was one of the first to be caught by anything of this kind; and she arrived, by way of her own emotions, at the cause of a great deal that was a mystery to older people, and also thought out the cure eventually; but she suffered a great deal in the process of acquiring her special knowledge of the subject. She was especially troubled by her old malady--depression of spirits. Sometimes, on a summer evening, when all the classes were at preparation, and the whole great house was still, a mistress would begin to practise in one of the music-rooms, and Beth would be carried away by the music, so that work was impossible. One evening, when this happened, she sat, with a very sad face, looking out on the river. Pleasure-boats were gliding up and down; a gay party went by, dancing on the deck of a luxurious barge to the music of a string-band; a young man skimmed the surface in a skiff, another punted two girls along; and people walked on the banks or sat about under the trees, and children played--and they were all free! Suddenly Beth burst into tears. Miss Smallwood questioned her. Was she ill? had she any pain? had any one been unkind to her? No? What was the matter then? Nothing; she was just miserable!

"Beth, don't be so silly," Miss Smallwood remonstrated. "A great girl like you, crying for nothing! It is positively childish."

The other girls stole glances at her and looked grave. At the beginning of the term they would not have sympathised perhaps; but this was the middle, and many of them were in much the same mood themselves.

When the bell rang, and the recreation hour began, they got out their little bits of fancy-work, and such dull childish books as they were allowed, and broke up into groups. Beth was soon surrounded by the cleverer girls in the class.

"I sympathise with you, Beth," said Janey North, a red-haired Irish girl, "for I felt like it myself, I did indeed."

"Will the holidays never be here?" sighed Rosa Bird.

"I can't think why I stay at all," said Beth. "I hate it--I hate it all the time."

"But how could one get away?" said Janey.

"Only by being ill," Agnes Stewart answered darkly. She was a delicate girl, and from that time she starved herself resolutely, until she was so wasted that Miss Clifford in despair sent her home. Another girl was seized with total deafness suddenly, and had also to go; the change brought her hearing back in a very short time; and some of the dockyard girls received urgent summonses from dying relations, and were allowed to go to them. They always returned the brighter for the experience.

One day, after the weather became cold, a girl appeared in class wrapped up in a shawl, and with her head all drawn down to one side. Her neck was stiff, and she could not straighten it. She was sent to the infirmary. The girls thought her lucky. For it was warm there, and nurse was kind, and sang delightful songs. She would be able to do fancy-work, too, and read as much as she liked, and would not have to get up till she had had her breakfast and the fire was lighted, and need not trouble about lessons at all--a stiff neck was a very small drawback to the delights of such a change.

Next day another girl's neck was stiff. Miss Smallwood searched for a draught, but did not succeed in finding one. That evening at prayers one of the girls in the first appeared in a shawl with her head on one side and a white worn face; and next day there was another case from the third and fourth. So it was evident that there was something like an epidemic going through the school; but the doctor had never seen one of the kind before, and was at a loss to account for it. The cases were all exactly alike: stiff neck, with the head drawn down to one side, accompanied by feverishness, and followed by severe prostration.

Beth sat with a stolid countenance, and stared solemnly at every girl that was attacked, as if she were studying her case. Then, one morning, she came down in a shawl herself, with her head on one side and a very white face. Nurse marched her off at once to the infirmary, and put her in a bed beside the fire, and Beth, as she coiled herself up, and realised that she need not worry about lessons, or rush off to practise when the bell rang, or go out to walk up and down in the garden till she hated every pebble on the path, heaved a great sigh of relief and fell asleep. When she awoke the doctor was feeling her pulse.

"She's very low," he said. "Is she a delicate girl naturally?"

"She looked strong enough when she came to school," nurse answered; "but she soon went off, as so many of them do."

"The loss of vitality amongst them is really extraordinary," the doctor observed. "Give her port wine and beef-tea. Don't keep her in bed too much, but don't hurry her up. Rest and relief from lessons is the great thing."

Some healthy pleasure to vary the monotonous routine, some liberty of action and something to look forward to, would have been better; but nobody thought of that.

How many of those necks were really stiff beyond the will of the sufferer to move it, no one will ever know; but when it occurred to Beth to straighten her own one day, she found no difficulty.

Chapter XXXII

When Beth was moved into the upper school, she came under the direct influence of Miss Crow, the English mistress of the third and fourth, who had been educated at St. Catherine's herself, and was an ardent disciple of Miss Clifford's. Beth, although predisposed to pietism, had not been sensibly influenced by Miss Clifford's teaching heretofore; now, however, she attached herself to Miss Crow, who began at once to take a special interest in her spiritual welfare. She encouraged Beth to sit and walk with her when she was on duty, and invited her to her room during recreation in order to talk to her earnestly on the subject of salvation, or to read to her and expound portions of Scripture, fine passages from religious books, and beautiful hymns. Some of the hymns she took the trouble to copy out for Beth's help and comfort when they were specially appropriate to the needs of her nature, such as "Calm me, my God, and keep me calm," or specially suited to her case, like "Call me! and I will answer, gladly singing!" Beth responded readily to her kindness, and very soon became a convert to her views; but she did not stop there, for it was not in Beth's nature to rest content with her own conversion while there were so many others still sitting in darkness who might be brought to the light. No sooner was she convinced herself than she began to proselytise among the other girls, and in a short time her eloquence and force of character attracted a following from all parts of the school. Miss Crow told Miss Clifford that she spoke like one inspired, and high hopes were entertained of the work which they somewhat prematurely concluded she was destined to do. Unfortunately Beth's fervent faith received a check at a critical time when it was highly important to have kept it well nourished--that is to say, when she was being prepared for confirmation. It happened when Miss Crow was hearing the girls their Scripture lesson one morning, the subject being the escape of the children of Israel from Egypt, and the destruction of Pharaoh's hosts in the Red Sea.

"I know a man who says the whole of that account has been garbled," Beth remarked in a dreamy way, meaning Count Gustav Bartahlinsky, but not thinking much of what she was saying.

Miss Crow nearly dropped the Bible, so greatly was she startled and shocked by the announcement.

"Beth!" she exclaimed, directly the class was over and she could speak to Beth privately, "how could you be so wicked as to say that anything in Holy Scripture is a garbled account?"

"I said I knew a man who said so," Beth answered, surprised that so simple a remark should have created such consternation.

But Miss Crow saw in her attitude a dangerous tendency to scepticism, and expressed strong condemnation of any one who presumed to do other than accept Holy Writ in blind unquestioning faith. She talked to Beth with horror about the ungodly men who cast doubt on the unity of the Bible, called its geology in question, and even ventured to correct its chronology by the light of vain modern scientific discoveries; and Beth shocked her again by the questions she asked, and the intelligent interest she showed in the subject. She told Miss Crow that Count Gustav had also said that the Old Testament was bad religion and worse history, but she did not know that other people had thought so too. Whereupon Miss Crow went to Miss Clifford and reported Beth's attitude as something too serious for her to deal with alone, and Miss Clifford sent for Beth and talked to her long and earnestly. She told her that it was absurd for a girl of her age to call in question the teaching of the best and greatest men that ever lived, which somehow reminded Beth of the many mistakes made by the best and greatest men that ever lived, of their differences of opinion and undignified squabbles, the instances of one man discovering and suffering for a truth which the rest refused to accept, and the constant modification, alteration, and rejection by one generation of teaching which had been upheld by another with brutality and bloodshed,--instances of all of which were notorious enough even to be known at a girls' school. Beth said very little, however; but she determined to read the Bible through from beginning to end, and see for herself if she could detect any grounds for the mischief-making doubts and controversies she had been hearing about. She began in full faith, but was brought up short at the very outset by the discrepancy between the first and second chapters of Genesis, which she perceived for the first time. She went steadily on, however, until she had finished the Book of Job, and then she paused in revolt. She could not reconcile the dreadful experiment which had entailed unspeakable suffering and loss irreparable upon a good man with any attribute she had been accustomed to revere in her deity. There might be some explanation to excuse this game of god and devil, but until she knew the excuse she would vow no adhesion to a power whose conduct on that occasion seemed contrary to every canon of justice and mercy. She did not belong to the servile age when men, forgetting their manhood, fawned on patrons for what they could get, and cringingly accepted favours from the dirtiest hands. Even her God must be worthy to help her, worthy to be loved, good as well as great. The God who connived at the torment of Job could not be the God of her salvation.

Beth had spoken casually in class. She had never questioned her religion, and would not have done so now if the remark had been allowed to pass; but the fuss that was made about it, and the severity with which she was rebuked, by putting her mind into a critical attitude, had the effect of concentrating her attention on the subject; so that it was the very precautions which were taken to check her supposed scepticism that first made her sceptical. The immediate consequence was that she gave up preaching and refused to be confirmed. Miss Clifford, Miss Crow, and the chaplain argued, expostulated, and punished in vain. It was the first case of the kind that had occurred in the school, and Beth was treated as a criminal; but she felt more like a martyr, and was not to be moved. She did not try to make partisans for herself, however; on the contrary, she deserted her family as well as her congregation, and took to wandering about alone again; but she was not unhappy. Her old faith had gone, it is true, but it had left the way prepared for a new one. She did not believe in the God of Job--because she was sure that there must be a better God--that was all.

From this time, however, her imagination rode rampant once more over everything. The vision and the dream were upon her. All wholesome interest in her work was over. There was an old piano in the reception-room which the girls were allowed to use for their amusement on half-holidays, and she often went there; but even when she practised, she moved her fingers mechanically, her mind busy with vivid scenes and moving dramatic incidents; so that her beloved music was gradually converted from an object in itself into an aid to thought.

It was only six weeks to the holidays, but oh! how the days dragged! She struggled to be conscientious, to be good, to please Miss Crow, to escape bad marks; but everything was irksome. Getting up, lessons, breakfast, making her bed, practising, lessons again, dressing, going out, dinner--the whole round of regular life was an effort. Her face grew thin and pale, she began to cough, and was put upon extras again. "We can't let you go home looking like that, you know," nurse said. Beth looked up at her out of her dream absently and smiled. She was enjoying a visionary walk at the moment with a vague being who loved her. They were out on a white cliff overlooking the sea in a wild warm region. The turf they trod on was vivid green, and short and springy; the water below was green and bright and clear, sea-birds skimmed the surface, and the air was sweet. But presently the road was barred by a rail, so they had to stop, and he put his arm round her, and she laid her head on his shoulder; and the murmur of wind and water was in her ears, and she became as the lark that sang above them, the curlew that piped, the quiet cattle, and all inanimate things--untroubled, natural, complete. All intellectual interest being suspended, she had begun to yearn for a companion, a mate. Her delicate mind refused to account for the tender sensation; but it was love, or rather the mood for love she had fallen into--the passive mood, which can be converted into the active in an ordinary young girl by almost any man of average attractions, provided she is not already yearning happily for some one in particular. It is not until much later that she learns to discriminate. There were girls at the school who saw in every man they met a possible lover, and were ready to accept any man who offered himself; but they were of coarser fibre than Beth, more susceptible to the physical than to the ideal demands of love, and fickle because the man who was present had more power to please than the one who was merely a recollection. The actual presence was enough for them, they had no ideals. With Beth it was different. Her present was apt to be but a poor faded substitute for the future with the infinite range of possibilities she had the power to perceive in it, or even for the past as she glorified it.

While she was in this mood she was particularly provoking to those in authority over her.

"Beth," said Miss Crow one day severely, "you are to go to Miss Clifford directly." Beth went.

"I hear," said Miss Clifford in her severest tone, "that you have not made your bed this morning."

"I went up to make it," Beth answered, trying dreamily to recollect what had happened after that.

"I must give you a bad mark," Miss Clifford said, and then paused; and Beth, who had not been attending, becoming conscious that something had been bestowed upon her, answered politely, "Thank you."

"Beth, you are impertinent," Miss Clifford exclaimed, "and I must punish you severely. Stay in the whole of your half-holiday and do arithmetic."

Then Beth awoke with a start, and realising what she had done, struggled to explain; but the moment she became herself again, an agony of dumbness came upon her, and she left the room without a word.

She spent the long bright afternoon cowering over her arithmetic, and crying at intervals, being in the lowest spirits, so that by prayer-time she was pretty well exhausted. She tried to attend to the psalms, but in the middle of them she became a poor girl suffering from a cruel sense of injustice. All her friends misunderstood her and were unkind to her, in consequence of which she pined away, and one day, in the midst of a large party, she dropped down dead.

And at this point she actually did fall fainting with a thud on the floor. Miss Clifford, who was giving out the hymn, stopped startled, and some of the girls shrieked. Miss Crow and one of the other teachers carried Beth out by the nearest door.

"Poor little thing!" said Miss Crow, looking pityingly at her drawn white face and purple eyelids. "I'm afraid she's very delicate."

Miss Clifford came also, when prayers were over, and said kind things; and from that time forward Beth received a great deal of sympathetic attention, which did her good, but in no way reconciled her to her imprisonment.

* * * * *

The following term, Beth watched the spring come in at school with infinite yearning. To be out--to be free to sit under the apple-trees and look up through the boughs at the faintly flushed blossom, till the vision and the dream came upon her, and she passed from conscious thought into a higher phase of being--just to do that was her one desire till the petals fell. Then pleasure-boats began to be rowed on the river, rowed or steered by girls no older than herself, in summer dresses delicately fresh; and she, seeing them, became aware of the staleness of her own shabby clothing, and writhed under the rules which would not allow her even to walk on the path overlooking the river, and gaze her fill at it. The creamy white flowers of the great magnolia on the lawn came out, and once she slipped across the grass to peer into them and smell them. She got a bad mark for that, the second she had had.

At preparation that evening she sat so that she could see the river, and watched it idly instead of working; and presently there floated into her mind the rhyme she made when she was a little child at Fairholm--

"The fairy folk are calling me."

Suddenly she caught her breath, her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkled, her whole aspect changed from apathy to animation, and she laughed.

"What has happened to please you, Beth; you look quite bright?" Miss Bey said, meeting her in the vestibule when preparation was over. Miss Bey was said to favour Beth by some; Beth was said to toady Bey by others; the truth being that they had taken to each other from the first, and continued friends.

"I've got a sort of singing at my heart," Beth answered, sparkling. "The fairy folk are calling me."

Beth slept in No. 5 then, and had the bed nearest to the window. There was a moon that night, and she lay long watching the light of it upon the blind--long after the gas was put out and the teachers had gone to their rooms. Wondering at last if the girls in the room were asleep, she sat up in bed, the better to be able to hear; and judged that they were. Then she got out of bed, walked quietly down the room in her night-dress and bare feet, opened the door cautiously, and found herself out in the carpetless passage. It was dark there, but she walked on confidently to the head of the grand staircase, which the girls were only allowed to use on special occasions. "This is a special occasion," Beth said to herself with a grin. "The fairy folk are calling me, and I must go out and dance on the grass in that lovely moonlight."

But how to get out was the difficulty. The hall door was bolted and barred. She went into the first and second. There were two large windows in the room which looked into the great conservatory, and one of them was open a crack. She pushed it up higher, and got through into the conservatory. There she found a large side window on the left of the first and second also open a little. The shelf in front of the window had flower-pots on it, which she moved aside, then got up herself, and with a tug, managed to raise the heavy sash. Then she sat on the sill and looked down. It was too far to jump, but a sort of dado of ornamental stonework came right up to the window, and by the help of this she managed to descend to the ground, and found herself free. For a moment she stood stretching herself like one just released from a cramped position, drawing in deep draughts of the delicious night air the while; then she bounded off over the dewy grass, and ran, and jumped, and waved her arms, every muscle of her rejoicing in an ecstasy of liberty. She ran round to the front of the house, regardless of the chance of some one seeing her from one of the windows, and danced round and round the magnolia, and buried her face in the big white flowers one after the other, and bathed it in the dew on their petals. Then she went to the path by the river and hung over the railing, and after that she visited the orchard, and every other forbidden place in the grounds. In the orchard she found some half-ripe fruit under the trees, and gathered it; and finding that she could not climb into the conservatory again with the fruit in her hands, she amused herself by throwing it through the open window.

It was harder to climb up than it had been to get down, but she accomplished the feat at last with sundry abrasions, shut the window, replaced the flower pots, got into the first and second, and went back to bed. Her night-dress was wet with dew, and her feet were scratched and dirty; but she was too much exhilarated by the exercise and adventure to feel any discomfort. She was sitting up in bed, hungrily munching some of her spoils, when Janey North, the girl in the next bed, awoke.

"What are you eating, Beth?" she asked in a cautious voice, whispering, fearful of awaking a monitress and being reported for talking.

"Apples," Beth answered. "Have some?"

"All right! but where did you get them?" Janey asked.

"Never you mind!" said Beth.

Janey did not mind at the moment, and ate the greater number, but next day she went treacherously and told, in order to ingratiate herself with one of the mistresses, and the matter was reported to Miss Clifford, who sent for Beth. Janey North was also sent for.

"What is this I hear about your having apples in your bedroom last night, Beth?" Miss Clifford said.

"A story, I should think," Beth answered readily. "Who told you?"

Janey North looked disconcerted.

"What have you to say, Miss North?" Miss Clifford asked.

"You were eating apples," Janey said to Beth.

"How do you know?" Beth asked suavely.

"I saw you."

"What, in the middle of the night when the gas was out?"

"Ye-yes," Janey faltered.

Beth shrugged her shoulders and looked at Miss Clifford, who said severely: "I think, Miss North, you have either dreamt this story or invented it."

Janey was barred in the school after that, the girls deciding that, whether the story were true or not, she was a dockyard girl for telling it. It was Beth's sporting instinct that had made her evade the question. When she had won the game, and the excitement was over, she felt she had been guilty of duplicity, and determined to confess when Miss Clifford sent for her next and gave her a good opportunity. She would have gone at once but for the dread of losing the precious liberty that was life to her. All through the weeks that followed she kept herself sane and healthy by midnight exercises in the moonlight. Her appetite had failed her till she took to this diversion, but after her second ramble she was so hungry that she went down to the kitchen boldly to forage in the hope of finding a crust. The fire was still burning brightly, and by its light she discovered on the table the thick bread and butter for the next morning's breakfast, all cut ready, and piled up under covers on the dishes. There was half a jug of beer besides, doubtless left from the servants' supper. It was rather flat, but she thought it and the new bread and butter delicious. She had a bad cold after the first ramble, but that was the only one, strange to relate, for she always went out in her night-dress, and bare-footed.

During this time her imagination was exceedingly active and her health improved, but her work was a greater trouble than ever. She had just been put into the third, but Miss Clifford threatened to put her down again if she did not do better, and one day she sent for Beth, who went trembling, under the impression that that was what the summons was for. She found Miss Clifford and Miss Bey discussing a letter, and both looking very serious.

"Beth," Miss Clifford began, "a gentleman whom I know well has written to tell me that he was walking home by the river-path at two o'clock on Monday morning, and saw a girl here at St. Catherine's with only her night-dress on, hanging over the railing looking into the river; and I am sure from the description it was you."

"Yes," said Beth, "I saw him."

Miss Clifford let the letter fall on her lap, and Miss Bey dropped into a chair. Beth looked on with interest, and wondered about that accurate description of herself; she would have given anything to see it.

"What were you doing there?" Miss Clifford asked; and Beth noticed that she was treating the matter just as her mother had treated the menagerie business.

"Just looking at the water," Beth said.

"At two o'clock in the morning! How did you get out?"

"By the conservatory window."

"Had you been out before?"

"Oh yes, often."

"Do any of the other girls go out?"

"Not that I know of," said Beth, then added, "No, I'm sure they don't."

"Thank Heaven for that, at all events!" Miss Clifford ejaculated. Then she made Beth sit down beside her, and took her hand, and gazed at her long and sorrowfully.

"Was it such a very dreadful thing to do?" Beth asked at last.

"You have been a great disappointment to me, Beth," Miss Clifford answered indirectly, "and to Miss Bey. We expected more of you than of any other girl now in the school--you promised so well in many ways at one time."

"Did I?" said Beth, looking from one to the other in consternation. "Oh, why didn't you tell me? I thought you all fancied I should never do anything well, and that disheartened me. If I had known----" She burst into tears.

Late that night Miss Clifford and Miss Bey sat together discussing Beth.

"I feel more than ever convinced there is something exceptional about the child," Miss Clifford declared. "I hope it is not insanity; but, at all events, it is not sin, and I won't have her punished. I say now what I said at first, she should have been sent here early, or not at all. And now she must go."

"What, expel her!" Miss Bey ejaculated.

"No. Didn't I say I would not have her punished? There is some explanation of her wild escapade besides mere naughtiness, I feel sure, and she shall have every chance that I can give her. There is no vice in her of any kind that I can discover, and she is fearlessly honest. If she were grown-up we should call her eccentric, and be interested and amused by her vagaries; and I do not see why she should not be allowed the same excuse as it is, only St. Catherine's is not the place for her. Here all must move in the common orbit, to save confusion. So I shall write to her mother, and get her to take her from the school at the end of the term in the regular way."

"But in the meantime?" Miss Bey asked.

"Beth has given me her word that she will be good, and do nothing I should disapprove of, and she will keep it."

So Beth's credit was saved by the good judgment of this kind, wise woman, and her career at St Catherine's ended honourably, if somewhat abruptly.

Chapter XXXIII

When it was rumoured amongst the mistresses that Beth was to leave that term, Old Tom put her on to play first piano in the first-class solo, and to lead the treble in the second-class duet at the examination.

"For I rather like ye, Miss Beth Caldwell," she said. "You're not a sycophant, whatever else ye are. They've not been able to do much wi' ye in regard to yer work in the rest of the school, but ye've done well under me, and I'll let ye have yer chance to distinguish yerself before ye go."

"Oh, but do you think I can do it?" Beth exclaimed.

"Ye can do anything ye set yerself to do, Beth Caldwell," Old Tom shouted at her.

Beth set herself accordingly, and when the day came she led the solo and duet with the precision of a musical box, but with such an expenditure of nerve-power that she was prostrated by the effort. She was considered quite a musician at St. Catherine's, but by this time the dire method of teaching had had its effect. Her confidence and her memory for music were gone, the beauty of her touch spoilt, and the further development of her talent effectually checked.

She did not go home for the holidays. Miss Clifford had advised, Lady Benyon approved, and Mrs. Caldwell decided, that she should be sent direct to a finishing school in London, and when St. Catherine's broke up, Miss Bey, who happened to be going that way, good-naturedly undertook to see Beth safely to her destination.

Miss Clifford held Beth's hand long, and gazed into her face earnestly when she took leave of her. "I shall hear of you again," she said, "and I pray God it may be good news; but it depends upon yourself, Beth. We are free agents. Good-bye, my dear child, and God bless you."

Beth had been eighteen intolerable months at the school, and had been exceedingly miserable most of the time, yet she left it with tears in her eyes, melted and surprised by the kindest farewells from every one. It had never dawned upon her until that moment that she was really very much liked.

Her new school was a large house in a long wide street of houses, all exactly alike. When she arrived with Miss Bey, they were shown into a deliciously cool shady drawing-room, charmingly furnished, and the effect upon Beth, after the graceless bareness of St. Catherine's, was altogether reassuring.

In front of the fireplace, which was hidden by ferns and flowering plants, a slender girl, with thick dark hair down her back, was lying on the white woolly hearthrug, reading. She got up to greet the visitors without embarrassment, still holding her book in her hand.

"Miss Blackburne will be here directly," she said. "Will you sit down?" Then there was a little pause, which Miss Bey broke by asking in her magisterial way, "What is that you are reading, my dear?"

"The Idylls of the King," the girl answered.

Miss Bey's nostrils flapped.

"Is it not rather advanced for you, my dear?" she said. "We do not allow it at all, even to our first-class girls."

"Oh, Miss Blackburne likes us to read it," was the easy answer. "She says that Tennyson and all the good modern writers are a part of our education."

"Thank goodness!" Beth ejaculated fervently. "At St. Catherine's our minds were starved on books suited to the capacity of infants and imbeciles."

"I should think, Beth, you are hardly old enough or educated enough to be a judge of literature as yet," Miss Bey said severely.

"Nor do I pretend to be a judge. How can I know anything of literature when literature is unknown at St. Catherine's? But I should think babes and sucklings would be wise enough to object to the silly trash we had instead of literature."

Beth spoke emphatically, shaking herself free of the restrictions of the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters once for all.

Miss Blackburne came in while she was speaking, and smiled.

"I like to hear a girl express an opinion," she said. "She may be quite wrong, but she must have some mind if she attempts to think for herself at all; and mind is material to work upon."

"I'm afraid I haven't much mind," Beth said, sighing, "or manner either."

Miss Blackburne smiled again, and looked at Miss Bey; but Miss Bey supported Beth in her self-depreciation by preserving an ominous silence.

"This is one of your new school-fellows," Miss Blackburne said to Beth; "let me introduce you to each other. Clara Herring, Beth Caldwell."

When Miss Bey took her leave, Miss Blackburne left the room with her, and immediately afterwards another girl came in, clapping her hands.

"Oh, I say!" she exclaimed, "Signor Caponi is a dear! He has the nicest chocolate eyes, and he says my Italian is wonderful! Now I've done all my work for to-day."

"Have you?" said Beth. "Why, it isn't five o'clock yet!"

"Miss Blackburne won't let us work long hours," the girl rejoined. "She says it destroys our freshness. But let us know each other's names. I am Geraldine Tressillion. Good name for a novel, isn't it?" and she clapped her little white hands and laughed again.

"That's just what you're made to be--the heroine of a novel," Clara Herring observed, looking at her admiringly. "I always think of you when I come across a gay one, with golden hair and blue eyes."

"I have my good points, I know," Geraldine rejoined. "But how about my hips? Too high, alas!"

"Oh, that won't show much while you're slight," said Clara, looking at her critically.

"Well, I'll make haste and marry me before I'm afflicted with flesh, as I'm sure to become. For I deny myself nothing--I live to eat," Geraldine rattled on cheerfully. "One can't get very fat before one comes out; and I hate a thin dowager. I'm engaged already, you know, but I don't like the man much--don't like him at all, in fact; and my sister says I can do better. She's been married a year, and has a baby. She told me all about it. Mamma imagines we're all innocent. A lady implored her to tell my sister things before she married, but she said she really could not speak to an innocent girl on such a subject. I don't believe she was ever so innocent herself. A grown girl can't be innocent unless she's a fool; but anyway, it's the right pose to pretend. You've got to play the silly fool to please a man; then he feels superior."

"But it's hypocritical," said Beth.

"Yes, my dear. But you must be hypocritical if you want to be a man's ideal of a woman. You must know nothing, do nothing, see nothing, but just what suits his pleasure and convenience; and in order to answer to his requirements you must be either a hypocrite, or a blind worm without eyes or intelligence. Men don't like innocence because it's holy, but because it whets their appetites, my sister says, and if they're deceived it serves them right. They work the world for their own pleasure, not ours; and we must look out for ourselves. If we want money, liberty, devotion, admiration, and any other luxury, we must pretend. Don't you see?"

"I don't know," Beth rejoined. "But, personally, I shall never pretend anything."

"Then you will suffer for your sincerity," Geraldine rejoined.

Beth shrugged her shoulders. The turn the conversation had taken was distasteful to her, and she would not pursue it.

There was a pause, then Clara observed sententiously:

"Innocence is not impossible, Geraldine. Surely Adelaide is innocent enough."

"I said innocence and intelligence were incompatible," Geraldine answered. "You don't call Adelaide intelligent, do you?"

"Who is Adelaide?" Beth asked.

"The daughter of a Roman Catholic peer," Geraldine replied. "She is eighteen, and her mind is absolutely undeveloped. We think she's in training for a convent, and that's why they don't let her learn much. Miss Ella Blackburne is a Roman Catholic, and so also is Adelaide's maid; They trot her round to all the observances of her Church regularly, and in the intervals she plays with the kitten. I don't know why she should have been sent here at all, for this is a regular forcing-house for the marriage market. Miss Blackburne expects all her girls to marry well, and they generally do. I should think, Miss Beth, she will be able to make something of you with those eyes!"

"Look at its neck and shoulders, too, and the way its head is set on them!" Clara exclaimed.

"Not to mention its hands and its complexion!" Geraldine supplemented. "But its voice alone--soft, gentle, and low--would get it into the peerage!"

Beth, unused to be appraised in this way, blushed and smiled, rather pleased, but confused.

"How many girls are there here?" she asked, to change the subject.

"Six boarders till you came, but now we are seven," Clara answered. "There are some day-girls too, but they are children, and don't count. The greatest pickle in the school is the daughter of an Archbishop--at least, she has been the greatest pickle so far--we don't know you as yet, however. But we have heard things!"

"Come and see my room," Geraldine interrupted. "And perhaps you'd like to see your own. It's next to mine."

"Are you allowed to go up and down stairs just as you like?" Beth asked in surprise.

"Why, of course!" Geraldine cried. "You can go where you like and sit where you like when you've done your work. We're not in prison!"

Beth had a dainty little room, hung with white curtains, all to herself. Her heart expanded when she saw it. The delightful appearance of her new surroundings had already begun to have the happiest effect upon her mind.

When Geraldine took her into her own room she drew a yellow book from under a quantity of linen in a drawer. "It's a French novel," she said. "Miss Blackburne wouldn't let me read it for worlds if she knew, so you mustn't tell. I'll lend it to you if you like."

"I couldn't read it if I would; I don't know enough," Beth said.

"Oh, you'll soon learn; and I'll tell you all there is in it. I say, what size is your waist? Mine is only seventeen inches; but I laced till I got shingles to reduce it to that. I know a doctor who says small waists are neither healthy nor beautiful; but then they're the fashion, and men are such awful fools about fashion. They sneer at a healthy figure, and saddle themselves every day with ailing wives, all deformed, because they're accustomed to see women so; and then they call us silly! My husband won't think me silly once I get command of his money, whatever else he may think me. Till then--!" she made a pretty gesture with her hands and laughed--Beth observing her the while with deep attention as a new specimen.

She found eventually that Geraldine was not at all a bad girl, or in the least inclined to be vicious, her conversation notwithstanding; she was merely a shrewd one learning how to protect herself in that state of life to which she was destined. If a woman is to make her way in society and keep straight, she must have wits and knowledge of a special kind. There is probably no more delightful, high-minded, charming-mannered, honourable and trustworthy woman in the world than a well-bred Englishwoman; but, on the other hand, there can be nothing more vulgar-minded, coarse, and despicable than women of fashion tend to become. There is no meanness nor shabbiness, not to mention fraud, that they will not stoop to when it suits themselves, from tricking a tradesman and sweating a servant, to neglecting their children, deceiving their husbands, and slandering their friends. They are sheep running hither and thither in servile imitation of each other, without an original thought amongst them; the froth of society, with the natural tendency of froth to rise to the surface and thence be swept aside; mere bubbles, that shine a moment and then burst. It is fashion that unsexes women and unmakes men. To be in the world of fashion and of it, is to degenerate; but to be in it and not of it, to know it and remain untainted, despising all it has to give, makes towards solid advance. There are some ugly stages to be gone through, however, before the advancement is pronounced.

The six girls at Miss Blackburne's were all daughters of people of position, all enjoying the same advantages and under the same influences; but three of them were already shaping themselves into women of fashion, while the other three were tending as inevitably to develop into women of fine character and cultivated mind. Beth was attracted to all such women, and recognised their worth, often long before they appreciated her at all. She was seventh among the girls, her place being in the middle, as it were, with three on either side of her, teaching her all they could, as was inevitable. In association with the budding women of fashion, she lost the first fine delicacy of maiden modesty of mind; but the example of the young gentlewomen, on the other hand, confirmed her taste and settled her convictions. The ladies who kept the school were high-minded themselves and exemplary in every possible way, and if they did not make all their pupils equally so, it was because factors go to the formation of character with which, for want of knowledge, no one can reckon at present. The influence of these ladies upon Beth was altogether benign. She was in a new world with them--a world of ease and refinement, of polished manners, of kindly consideration, where, instead of being harried by nagging rules, stultified by every kind of restraint, and lowered in her own estimation for want of proper respect and encouragement, she was allowed as much liberty as she would have had in a well-ordered home, and found herself and her abilities of special interest to each of her teachers. Instead of being an item, a part of a huge piece of machinery to be strictly kept in the particular place assigned to her, whether it were adapted to the needs of her nature or not, for fear of putting the whole mechanism out of order, her present and future being less considered than the smooth working of the machine--she was a girl again with some character of her own to be formed and developed. Here, too, she was put upon her honour to do all that was expected of her, and the immediate consequence of this in her case was the most scrupulous exactness. She attached herself to Miss Ella, attracted first of all by the fact that she was a Roman Catholic. How she could be one was a mystery Beth longed to solve; but Miss Ella did not consider it loyal to Protestant parents to influence their daughters at school, and would give her no help in this. In every other respect, however, Beth found her exceedingly kind and sympathetic, a serene, strong woman, who began to curb the exuberance of Beth's naughtiness from the first, and to direct the energy of which it was the outcome into profitable channels.

There was no monotony in Miss Blackburne's establishment. The girls were taken in turns to operas, concerts, picture-galleries, and every kind of exhibition that might help to cultivate their minds. To be able to discuss such things was a part of their education. They were expected to describe all they saw, fluently and pleasantly, but without criticism enough to require thought and provoke argument, which is apt to be tedious; and thus was formed the habit of chatting in the genial light frothy way which does duty for conversation in society. Geraldine had not exaggerated when she called Miss Blackburne's school a forcing house for the marriage market. At that time marriage was the only career open to a gentlewoman, and the object of her education was to make her attractive. The theory then was that solid acquirements were beyond the physical strength of girls, besides being unnecessary. Showy accomplishments, therefore, were all that was aimed at; but they had to be thorough. Music, singing, drawing, dancing, French, German, Italian--whatever it might be; the girl who was learning it had the greatest attention from her master or mistress during the lesson; she was made to do it as much by the will of the teacher as by her own intelligence. This was the first experience of thorough teaching Beth had ever had, and she enjoyed it, and would have worked harder to profit by it than Miss Blackburne would allow. As it was, she made great progress with her work, while all the time the more informal but most valuable part of her education, which was directed to the strengthening of every womanly attribute, went on steadily under the influence of Miss Ella.

It would have been well for Beth if she had been left at Miss Blackburne's for the next three years; but just when the rebellious beating of her wings against the bars had ceased, and they had folded themselves contentedly behind her for awhile; just when the wild flights of her imagination were giving way to wholesome habits of thought, and her own vain dreams were being dissipated by the honest ambition to accomplish something actual--she was summoned away. Her sister Mildred had died suddenly of meningitis, and the immediate effect of the shock on Mrs. Caldwell, who had dearly loved her eldest daughter, was a kindlier feeling for Beth, and a wish to have her at home--for a time at all events. And Beth went willingly under the circumstances. She sympathised deeply with her mother, and was full of grief herself for her sister, to whom she had been tenderly attached although they had seen so little of each other. Beth was not yet sixteen, and this was the third blow that death had dealt her.

Chapter XXXIV

Beth had a natural love of order, and at school she had learnt the necessity for it. She did not mean to give up work when she went home; on the contrary, she determined to do more than ever. Miss Ella had taught her to be deliberate, neither to haste nor to rest, but steadily to pursue. She insisted that things to be well done must be done regularly, and Beth, in accordance with this precept, mapped out her day so as to make the most of it. She got up at seven, opened her window wider, threw the clothes back from her bed to air it, had her bath, brushed her hair; left nothing untidy lying about her room; did her good reading, the psalms and lessons; breakfasted, made her bed, studied French, went out for exercise, sewed, and read so much, all in the same order every day. She paid particular attention to her personal appearance, too, that being the one of her mother's principles which had also been most particularly enjoined by Miss Blackburne. At both of her schools marriage was the great ambition of most of the girls. At St Catherine's it meant a means of escape from many hardships; to Miss Blackburne's girls it offered the chance of a better position, and more money and luxury. There was a nicer tone among the Royal Service girls, and more reticence in their discussions of the subject than at Miss Blackburne's, where the girls were not at all high-minded, and talked of their chances with the utmost frankness, not to say coarseness; but good looks were held to be the best, if not the only means to the end in both sets. Money and accomplishments might help, but personal appearance was the great certainty; and Beth was naturally impressed with this idea like the rest. Marriage, however, was far from being the distinct object of her life; in fact, she had no distinct object at all as yet. She had always meant to do something, or rather to be something; but further than that she had not got.

Miss Blackburne had paid particular attention to the cultivation of the speaking voice, and it was from her that Beth had learnt how to round hers to richness, and modulate it so that its natural sweetness and charm were greatly enhanced. There was considerable difference of opinion about her looks. She was always striking in appearance, but dress, for one thing, altered her very much, and the state of her mind still more. People who met her on one occasion admired her exceedingly, and on the next wondered why they had thought her good-looking at all. She had the mesmeric quality which makes it impossible to escape observation, and her personality never failed to interest the intelligent whether it pleased them or not; but she was only at her best in mind, manner, and appearance when her fitful further faculty was active; then indeed she shone with a strange loveliness, a light to be felt rather than seen, and not to be described at all. At such times the mere physical beauty of other women went out in her immediate neighbourhood, and was no more thought of. It was not until she was quite mature, however, that her manner permanently acquired that subtle indefinable quality called charm, which is the outcome of a large tolerant nature and kindness of heart. It was as if she did not come into full possession of her true self until she had experienced numberless other phases of being common to the race. Hence the apparently incongruous mixture she presented in the earlier stages of her youth, her sluggish indifference at times, her excesses of energy and zeal, her variations of taste.

At first, after she left school, as was inevitable, her self-discipline was irksome enough at times, and some of the details she shirked; but not for long, because the time which accustomed duties should have occupied hung heavy on her hands, and she felt dissatisfied with herself rather than relieved when she neglected them. So by degrees her habits were formed, and in after life she found them a very present help in time of trouble, anchors which kept her from drifting to leeward, as she must have done but for their hold upon her. Some of her erratic tricks were not to be cured, but they came to be part of the day's work rather than a hindrance to it. She saw many a sunrise, for instance, and revelled with uplifted spirit in the beauty and wonder of the hour; but the soul that sang responsive to the glories of the summer dawn, the colour, the freshness, the perfume, was steeped at noon with equal energy in the book she was studying, so that, instead of losing anything, she gained that day one sunrise more.

When she left school Beth was fastidiously refined. She hurried over all the hateful words and passages in the Bible, Shakespeare, or any other book she might be reading. The words she would not even pronounce to herself, so strongly did her delicate mind revolt from a vile idea, and sicken at the expression of it. But, nevertheless, she pored patiently over every book she could get that had a great reputation, and in this way she read many not usually given to girls, and became familiarised with certain facts of life not generally supposed to be of soul-making material. But she took no harm. The soul that is shaping itself to noble purpose, the growing soul, tries more than is proper for its nourishment in its search for sustenance, but rejects all that is unnecessary or injurious, as water creatures without intelligence reject any unsuitable substance they collect with their food.

Before she had been many days at home, Beth found that her mother had made a new acquaintance, who came to the house often in a casual way like an intimate friend. He came in on the day of her arrival after dinner, and was introduced to Beth by her mother as "the doctor." Beth broke into smiles, for she recognised her long-ago acquaintance of the rocks, the doctor of her Hector-romance. And it seemed he really was a doctor; now that was a singular coincidence! In their little drawing-room she discovered him to be a bigger man than she had supposed, but otherwise he was like her first impression of him, striking because of his colouring; the red and white of his complexion, which was unusually clear for a man, and the lightness of his grey-green eyes being in peculiar contrast to the blackness of his hair. She noticed again, too, that the expression of his face when he smiled was not altogether agreeable, because his teeth were too far apart; and she also thought his finely-formed hands would have looked better had they not been so obtrusively white.

"But we have met before," he exclaimed when Beth acknowledged the introduction. "You are the young lady I helped on the rocks one day, quite a long time ago now, when you were a little girl."

"I remember," Beth said, noticing that he claimed to have helped her on that occasion, and remembering also that she had declined his help.

"You never told me, Beth," her mother said reproachfully.

"There was really nothing to tell," he answered, coming to the rescue.

"What a day that was!" Beth observed. "Did you notice the sea? It was the sort of sea that might make one long to be a crab to live in it. Though a crab is not the animal that I should specially choose to be. I long to be a cat sometimes. To be able to fluff out my fur and spit would be such a satisfaction. There are feelings that can be expressed in no other way. And then to be able to purr! Purring is the one sound in nature that expresses perfect comfort and content, I think."

"Beth, don't talk nonsense," her mother said impatiently.

"Oh, it's not nonsense altogether," the doctor interposed. "It is just cheery chatter, and that is good. Miss Beth will raise your spirits in no time, or I'm much mistaken." He had watched Beth with gravity while she was speaking, as one sees people watch an actress critically, obviously marking her points, but betraying no emotion.

Mrs. Caldwell sighed heavily. "The doctor has been so good, Beth," she said. "He has come here continually, and done more to cheer me than anybody."

"Oh now, Mrs. Caldwell, you exaggerate," he remonstrated with a smile. "But it's my principle, you know, to be cheery. I always say be cheery whatever happens. It's no use crying over spilt milk!"

"A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a,"

Beth rattled off glibly, and again the doctor considered her.

"Now that's good," he said, just as if he had never heard it before; "and it's my meaning exactly. Don't let your spirits go down----"

"For there's many a girl, as I know well, A-looking for you in the town,"

Beth concluded, her spirits rising uproariously.

"Beth!" her mother remonstrated, but with a smile.

"The worst of it is, the ones on the look-out are not the ones with the good looks," the doctor observed, also smiling.

"But they are the ones with the money," Beth rejoined. "I wonder how it is that plain girls so often have money. I suppose the money-grubbing spirit comes out in ugliness in the female branch."

Tea was brought in, but Beth refused to take any. The doctor tried to persuade her.

"You had better change your mind," he said. "Ladies are privileged to change their minds."

"I know," said Beth. "Ladies are privileged to be foolish. It is almost the only privilege men allow them. I scorn it myself. At school we were warned to be firm when once we had said 'No, thank you.' Miss Ella used to say that people who allowed themselves to be over-persuaded and changed their minds lost self-control and became self-indulgent eventually."

"Ah, that makes me think of my poor dear mother," said the doctor. "A better and more consistent woman never lived. Once she said a thing, you couldn't move her. She was a good mother to me! I was always her favourite son. But, like other young fellows, I'm afraid I didn't half appreciate her till I had lost her."

"All the same, I am sure you were all that a good son should be," Mrs. Caldwell observed sincerely.

The doctor's eyes shone with emotion.

When he had gone, Mrs. Caldwell began to discuss him.

"He really is cheery," she said, "he always raises my spirits; and I am sure he is good and kind. Did you see how his eyes filled with tears when he mentioned his mother? He is handsome, too, don't you think so? Such a colour! And always so well dressed. Lady Benyon admires him very much. But he gets on with every one, even Uncle James! What do you think of him, Beth?"

"I think he looks neat to the point of nattiness, which is finical in a man," Beth answered.

"Ah, that is because you are not accustomed to well-dressed men," her mother assured her. "Here in Rainharbour you don't often see one."

"I have been in London lately," Beth observed.

"Beth," her mother began emphatically, "that is so like you! Will you never get out of the habit of answering so? You are always in opposition, and it is too conceited of you at your age. I did hope they would have cured you of the trick at school; but no sooner do you get home, than you begin again as bad as ever."

"Well, rather than displease you, mamma, I'll do my best to hold my tongue for the future when I can't say what you want me to say," Beth answered cheerfully. "I came home to be a comfort to you, and if I can't be a comfort to you and express myself as well, why, I must go unexpressed."

"Now, there you are again, Beth," Mrs. Caldwell cried peevishly. "Is that a nice thing to say?"

Beth looked at her mother and smiled enigmatically. Then she reflected. Then her countenance cleared.

"Mamma," she said, "your hair is much whiter than it was; but I don't think I ever saw you look so nice. You have such a pretty complexion, and so few wrinkles, and such even teeth! What a handsome girl you must have been!"

Mrs. Caldwell smiled complacently, and went to bed in high good humour. She told Bernadine, as they undressed, that she thought Beth greatly improved.

But Beth herself lay long awake that night; tossing and troubled, feeling far from satisfied either with herself or anybody else.

The next morning she rose early and drew up her plan of life.

Chapter XXXV

As that first day at home wore on, Beth was seized with an importunate yearning to go out, and it was with difficulty that she got through her self-appointed tasks. She thought of the sea, the shore, the silence and solitude, which were apt to be so soothing to her dull senses that she ceased to perceive with them, and so passed into the possession of her farther faculty for blissful moments. She fancied the sea was as she best loved to have it, her favourite sea, with tiny wavelets bringing the tide in imperceptibly over the rocks, and the long stretch of water beyond heaving gently up to the horizon, with smooth unruffled surface shining in the sun. When she had done her work she fared forth to the sea, to sit by it, and feel the healthy happy freshness of it all about her, and in herself as well. She went to the rocks. The tide was coming in. The water, however, was not molten silver-grey, as she had imagined it, but bright dark sapphire blue, with crisp white crests to the waves, which were merry and tumbled. It was the sea for an active, not for a meditative mood; its voice called to play, rather than to that prayer of the whole being which comes of the contemplation of its calmness; it exhilarated instead of soothing, and made her joyous as she had not been since she went to school. She stood long on the rocks by the water's edge, retreating as the tide advanced, watching wave after wave curve and hollow itself and break, and curve and hollow itself and break again. The sweet sea-breeze sang in her ears, and braced her with its freshness, while the continuous sound of wind and water went from her consciousness and came again with the ebb and flow of her thoughts. But the strength and swirl of the water, its tireless force, its incessant voices choiring on a chorus of numberless notes, invited her, fascinated her, filled her with longing--longing to trust herself to the waves, to lie still and let them rock her, to be borne out by them a little way and brought back again, passive yet in ecstatic enjoyment of the dreamy motion. The longing became an impulse. She put her hand to her throat to undo her dress--but she did not undo it--she never knew why. Had she yielded to the attraction, she must have been drowned, for she could swim but little, and the water was deeper than she knew, and the current strong; and she might have yielded just as she resisted, for no reason that rendered itself into intelligible thought.

She turned from the scene of her strange impulse, and began to wander back over the rocks, suffering the while from that dull drop of the spirit which sets in at the reaction after moments of special intensity; and in this mood she came upon "the doctor," also climbing the rocks.

"Now, it is a singular coincidence that I should meet you here again," he said.

Beth smiled. "I am afraid those nice boots of yours will suffer on these sharp rocks," she remarked by way of saying something. "We natives keep our old ones for the purpose."

"Ah," he said, "I don't keep old ones for any purpose. I have an objection to everything old, old people included."

Beth had a book under her arm, and he coolly took it from her as he spoke, and read the title: "Dryden's Poetical Works." "Ah! So you carry the means of improving your mind at odd moments about with you. Well, I'm not surprised, for I heard you were clever."

Beth smiled, more pleased than if he had called her beautiful; but she wondered if Dryden could properly be called improving.

"It is absurd to keep a girl at school who has got as far as this kind of thing," he added, tapping the old brown book; "but it seems to me they don't understand you much at home, little lady."

"What makes you think so?" Beth asked shrewdly.

"Oh," he answered, somewhat disconcerted, "I judge from--from things I hear and see."

This implied sympathy, and again Beth was pleased.

It was late when she got in, and she expected her mother to be annoyed; but Mrs. Caldwell was all smiles.

"I suppose the doctor found you?" she said. "He asked where you were, and I said on the rocks probably."

"That accounts for the singular coincidence," Beth observed; but, girl-like, she thought less at the moment of the little insincerity than of the compliment his following her implied.

They dined that evening with Lady Benyon. It was a quiet little family party, including Uncle James and Aunt Grace Mary. The doctor was the only stranger present. He looked very well in evening dress.

"Striking, isn't he?" Aunt Grace Mary whispered to Beth. "Such colouring!"

"And how are you, Dan?" was Uncle James's greeting, uttered with an affectation of cordiality in his unexpected little voice that interested Beth. She wondered what was toward. She noticed, too, that she herself was an object of special attention, and her heart expanded with gratification. Very little kindness went a long way with Beth.

Dr. Dan took her in to dinner.

"By the way," he said, looking across the table at Uncle James, "I went to see that old Mrs. Prince, your keeper's mother, as I promised. She's a wonderful old woman for eighty-five. I shouldn't be surprised if she lived to a hundred."

"Dear! dear!" Uncle James ejaculated with something like consternation.

"I seem to have put my foot in it somehow," Dr. Dan remarked to Beth confidentially.

"If you do anything to keep her alive you will," Beth answered. "Uncle James always speaks bitterly about elderly women;--about old ones he is perfectly rabid. He seems to think they rob worthy men of part of their time by living so long."

It was arranged before the party broke up that the doctor should drive Beth to Fairholm in the Benyon dogcart to lunch next day. Beth was surprised and delighted to find herself the object of so much consideration. Dr. Dan, as they all called him, began to be associated in her mind with happy days.

"Have you come to live here?" she asked as they drove along.

"No," he answered. "I am only putting in the time until I can settle down to a practice of my own. I have just heard of one which I shall buy if I can get an appointment I am trying for in the same place."

"What is the appointment?" Beth asked.

"It's a hospital I want to be put in charge of," he answered casually,--"a small affair, but I should get a regular income from it, and that would make my rent, and all that sort of thing, secure. A doctor has to set up with a show of affluence."

"It is a terrible profession to me, the medical profession," Beth said. "The responsibilities must be so great and so various."

"Oh, I never think of that," he answered easily.

"I should," Beth rejoined.

"Yes, you would, of course," he said; "and that shows what folly it is for women to go in for medicine. They worry about this and that, things that are the patient's look-out, not the doctor's, and make no end of mischief; besides always losing their heads in a difficulty."

Just then the horse, which had been very fidgety all the way, bolted. The blood rushed into the doctor's face. "Sit tight! sit tight!" he exclaimed. "Don't now,--now don't move and make a fuss. Keep cool."

"Keep cool yourself," said Beth dryly. "I'm all right."

Dr. Dan glanced at her sideways, and saw that she was laughing.

When they arrived at Fairholm, he made much of the incident. "If I hadn't had my wits about me, there would have been a smash," he vowed. "But I happened to be on the spot myself, and Miss Beth behaved admirably. Most girls would have shrieked, you know, but she behaved heroically."

This was all rather gushing, but it did not offend Beth, because she associated gush with Aunt Grace Mary, who had always been kind to her. Gushing people are usually weak and amiable, gush being the ill-judged outcome of a desire to please; but at that happy age it was the amiable intention that Beth took into account. Her desire to be pleased, which had so seldom been gratified, had become a danger to her judgment by this time; it made her apt to respond to any attempt to please her without considering means and motives which should have discounted her appreciation. Everybody was trying to please her now, and all her being answered only too readily. She spent a delightful day at Fairholm, and went home in extravagantly high spirits.

Dr. Dan called early the next morning, and found her with her hat on, just going out.

"How are you this misty cold grey day?" he asked.

"Oh, very bright," she answered. "I feel as if I were the sun, and I'm just going to shine out on the world to enliven it."

"May I accompany you?" he asked.

"The sun, alas! is a solitary luminary," she answered, shaking her head.

"Then I shall hope for better luck next time," he said, and let her go alone.

In the evening he came in again to have a game of cribbage with Mrs. Caldwell. Beth was sleepy and had gone to bed early. In the pauses of the game they talked about her, and the responsibilities of a family.

"A girl wants some one to look after her," the doctor said, "especially if she has money."

"Yes, indeed," Mrs. Caldwell replied, "girls are a great anxiety. Now a boy you can put into a profession and have done with it. But it is not so easy to find a suitable husband for a girl."

"But, of course, if she has a little money it makes a difference," he observed. "Only she should have some one to advise her in the spending of it. Now, Miss Beth, for instance, will be as much a child at twenty-one in money matters as she is now."

"I hope we shall find the right man for her before then," Mrs. Caldwell answered archly; "not that I think her aunt's fortune will cause her much anxiety." She alluded to the smallness of the sum.

"She gets some of the interest, I suppose, to go on with," he said.

"Just enough to dress on."

Beth saw a great deal of Dr. Dan after that. She was not in the least in love with him, but they became intimate all the sooner on that account. A girl shrinks more shyly from a man she loves than from one for whom she has only a liking; in the one case every womanly instinct is on the alert, in the other her feeling is not strong enough to seem worth curbing. Beth was fond of men's companionship, and Dr. Dan's assiduous attentions enlivened her, made her brain active, and brought the vision and the dream within reach; so that she moved in a happy light, but considered the source of it no more than she would have considered the stick that held the candle by which she read an entrancing book.

There are idyllic gleams in all interesting lives; but life as we live it from day to day is not idyllic. In Beth's case there was the inevitable friction, the shocks and jars of difficulties and disagreements with her mother. These had been suspended for a time after her return, but began to break out again, fomented very often by Bernadine, who was always her mother's favourite, but was never a pleasant child. Dr. Dan came one very wet day, and found Beth sitting in the drawing-room alone, looking miserable. She had done all her little self-imposed tasks honestly, but had reaped no reward. On the contrary, there had come upon her a dreadful vision of herself doing that sort of thing on always into old age, as Aunt Victoria did her French, with no object, and to no purpose; and for the first time she formulated a feeling that had gradually been growing up in her of late: "I must have more of a life than this." What could she do, however, tied to that stupid place, without a suspicion as yet that she had it in her to do anything special, and without friends to help her, with no one to advise. As she reflected, the hopelessness of it all wrung from her some of the bitterest tears she ever shed. If her mother would only send her back to Miss Blackburne she would be learning something, at all events; but, although Mrs. Caldwell had said nothing definite on the subject, Beth was pretty certain by this time that she did not mean to let her return to school.

Beth was in the middle of this misery when Dr. Dan arrived.

"How's this?" he said, "Down? You should have the window open. It's not cold to-day, though it's wet; and the room is quite stuffy. Never be afraid of fresh air, you know."

"I'm not," Beth said. "I didn't know the window was shut. Open it as wide as you like--the wider the better for me."

"That's better," he said, as the fresh air flowed in. "It's singular how women will shut themselves up. No wonder they get out of spirits! Now, I never let myself run down. When one thing goes wrong, I just take up another, and don't bother. You'd think I wasn't having much of a time here; but I'm as happy as the day is long, and I want to see you the same." He sat down beside her on the old-fashioned sofa, took her hand, and began to stroke it gently. "Cheer up, little girl," he added. "I believe you've been crying. Aren't they kind to you?"

"Oh yes, they're kind enough," Beth answered, soothed by the caress; "at least they mean to be. The misery is in myself. I feel all dissatisfied."

"Not when I'm with you, do you?" he asked reproachfully.

"No, I don't bother about myself when I have you to talk to," Beth answered. "You come in fresh, and give me something else to think about."

"Then, look here, Beth," he said, putting his arm round her. "I don't think I can do better than take you away with me. You've a head on your shoulders, and an original way with you that would be sure to bring people about the house, and you're well connected and look it;--all of which would be good for my practice. Besides, a young doctor must marry. I'm over thirty, though you might not think it. Come, what do you say? You'd have a very good time of it as my wife, I can tell you. All your own way, and no nagging. You know what I am, a cheery fellow, never put out by anything. Now, what do you say?"

"Are you asking me to marry you?" said Beth, breaking into a smile. The position struck her as comical rather than serious.

"Why, what else?" he replied, smiling also. "I see you are recovering your spirits. You'll be as happy as the day is long when we're married. You'd never get on with anybody else as you'd do with me. I don't think anybody else would understand you."

Beth laughed. She liked him, and she liked to be caressed. Why not marry him and be independent of every one? She hadn't the slightest objection at the moment; far from it, for she saw in the offer the one means of escape she was likely to have from the long dull dreary days, and the loneliness, which was all the life she could have to look forward to when he had gone. And he was good-looking, too, and nice--everybody said so. Besides, they would all be pleased if she accepted him, her mother especially so. Now that she came to think of it, she perceived that this was what they had been suggesting to her ever since her return.

"It is settled then?" he said, stooping forward to look into her face.

She looked at him shyly and laughed again. For the life of her she could not keep her countenance, although she felt she was behaving in the silly, giggling-girl sort of way she so much despised.

"That's all right," he exclaimed, looking extremely well pleased; and at that moment Mrs. Caldwell walked into the room, just in time to witness a lover-like caress. Beth jumped up, covered with confusion. Mrs. Caldwell looked from one to the other, and waited for an explanation.

"We've just come to the conclusion that we cannot live apart," Dan said deliberately, rising at the same time and taking Beth's hand.

"My dear child!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed, embracing Beth with happy tears in her eyes. "This is a joy! I do congratulate you."

Beth became suddenly serious. The aspect of the affair had changed. It was no longer a game of the moment, but a settled business, already irrevocable. She wanted to explain that she had not actually pledged herself, that she must take time to consider; but her heart failed her in view of her mother's delight. It was Beth's great weakness that, as a rule, she could neither spoil pleasure nor give pain to save herself in an emergency.