that is, the transcendent beauty that every one acknowledges."

"And very rare," said Mary. "I should like to see the beauty every one
would acknowledge. If this girl seemed as beautiful to every one as she
does to you, I think she would have been advanced to a tobacconist's
shop at least by this time."

"Don't speak of it!" said her brother.

V.

On the following day about the same hour Dr. Brunton approached the
lodge where he had come so often full of pity, and had submitted to be
bored with a good grace. But instead of dragging himself up to make this
visit as a tiresome duty, which he had sometimes felt it to be, it had
floated before his mind all day, and he went through the gate with the
most vivid and even tremulous expectation and interest. But the
celestial beauty in the amber beads was not there. He sat and listened
patiently to the old woman's story, and various times tried to draw her
out about her visitor of yesterday; but she was so occupied with herself
that she could speak of nothing else, and he left with a stinging, empty
sense of disappointment, as he did on the next day, and the next; but on
the fourth the rustic beauty reappeared, as innocently simple and
slightly sheepish in manner as before.

"You have not been here for some days?" the doctor said to her.

"Na, I couldna coom."

"Why not?"

"My faither said I was to bide in the house and mind my wark."

"What do you do? Can you read well?"

"Oh, ay, I can read no that ill: I whiles take a lesson on the
newspapers."

"Can you write?"

"Weel, I canna say muckle for my writing, but the likes o' us hae nae
time to put off writing;" and she sent her eyes right into the eyes of
the doctor, as they stood beside Bell's little window--innocently,
simply, appealingly, the doctor felt--and from that moment he was a lost
man: his prudence went down like straws before the wind.

"You are far too beautiful," he said with deep earnestness, "to go to
service: would you not like to be educated and be a lady?"

"Oh, I wad like it weel aneuch, I daur say, but I'll just hae to be
content wi' the place I'm in: I've a heap to be thankfu' for, and I maun
bide wi' my faither."

"But you'll not be with him if you are at service?"

"No, but I can help him with the siller I mak."

The doctor was silent. This girl was good, then, as well as beautiful.

"Are you his only child?" he asked: "have you no brothers or sisters?"

"I've nae brothers, but