and for a few moments
the two forgot their habitual restraint and were but naked souls
mingling together.

"It's a shame," exclaimed Beulah at length. "We're not living; we're
just existing. When I get among people that are really living--like
the Grants, over there--you don't know how mortified and mean I feel.
And it's not that alone--it's the sense of loss, the sense that life
is going by and I'm not making the best of it. You know we are
missing the _real thing_; we are just living on the husks, and father
is so blind he thinks the husks are the grain itself."

"Your father is hungry, too," said the mother. "Hungry--hungry, and
he thinks that more land, more money, more success, will fill him.
And in the meantime he's forgetting the things that would
satisfy--the love that was ours, the little devo--Oh, child, what am
I saying? What an unfaithful creature I am! You must forget, Beulah,
you must forget these words--words of shame they are!"

"The shame is his," declared the girl, defiantly, "and I won't stand
this nonsense about homesteading again--I just won't stand it. If he
says anything more about it I'll--I'll fly off, that's what I'll do.
And I've a few remarks for him about Riles that won't keep much
longer. The old badger--he's at the bottom of all this."

"You mustn't quarrel with your father, dearie, you mustn't do that."

"I'm not going to quarrel with him, but I'm going to say some things
that need saying. And if it comes to a show-down, and he must
go--well, he must, but you and I will stay with the old farm, won't
we, mother?"

But the mother's thought now was for quelling the storm in the
turbulent heart of her daughter. Beulah's nature was not one to lend
itself to passive submission, nor yet passive resistance. She was the
soul of loyalty, but with that loyalty she combined a furious
intolerance of things as they should not be. She had not yet reached
the philosophic age, but she was old enough to value life, and to
know that what she called the real things were escaping here. At
night, as she looked up at the myriad stars spangling the heavens,
the girl's heart was filled with an unutterable yearning; a sense of
restriction, of limitation, of loss--a sense that somewhere lay a
Purpose and a Plan, and that only by becoming part of that Plan could
life be lived to the fullest. Her mother was of a different nature,
not less brave, but more resigned; content to fill, without question,
the niche