it is only for the sake of settling yourself
in life that you are marrying him?'

'I respect Dr. Reed more than any man living; I bear for him a most
sincere affection, and I hope to make him a good wife.'

'You don't love him as you did Mr. Harding? If you will only wait you
may get him. The tenants are paying their rents very well, and I am
thinking of going to London in the spring.'

The girl winced at the mention of Harding, but she looked into her
mother's soft appealing brown eyes; and, reading clearer than she had
ever read before all the adorable falseness that lay therein, she
answered:

'I do not want to marry Mr. Harding; I am engaged to Dr. Reed, and I do
not intend to give him up.'

This answer was given so firmly that Mrs. Barton lost her temper for a
moment, and she said:

'And do you really know what this Dr. Reed originally was? Lord Dungory
is dining here to-night; he knows all about Dr. Reed's antecedents, and
I am sure he will be horrified when he hears that you are thinking of
marrying him.'

'I cannot recognize Lord Dungory's right to advise me on any course I
may choose to take, and I hope he will have the good taste to refrain
from speaking to me of my marriage.'

'What do you mean? How dare you speak to me like that, you impertinent
girl!'

'I am not impertinent, mother, and I hope I shall never be impertinent
to you; but I am now in my twenty-fifth year, and if I am ever to judge
for myself, I must do so now.'

Alice was curiously surprised by her own words; it seemed to her that it
was some strange woman, and not herself--not the old self with whom she
was intimately acquainted--who was speaking. Life is full of these
epoch-marking moments. We have all at some given time experienced the
sensation of finding ourselves either stronger or weaker than we had
ever before known ourselves to be; Alice now for the first time felt
that she was speaking and acting in her own individual right; and the
knowledge as it thrilled through her consciousness was almost a physical
pleasure. But notwithstanding the certitude that never left her of the
propriety of her conduct, and the equally ever-present sentiment of the
happiness that awaited her, she suffered much during the next ten days,
and she was frequently in tears. Cecilia had started for St. Leonards
without coming to wish her good-bye, and the cruel sneers, insinuations
of all kinds against her and against Dr. Reed, which Mrs. Barton nev