r and promise, and also because her brain is too delicately
poised to stand the kind of shocks and jars that threaten her. You
will take pity on her, Angelica?"

Mrs. Kilroy shrugged her shoulders. "How can I countenance a woman who
acquiesces in such a position as her husband holds, and actually lives
on his degrading work?"

"I don't believe she knows anything about it," he rejoined.

"If I were sure of that," said Angelica, meditating.

"It is easy enough to make sure," he suggested.

* * * * *

Mrs. Carne, wife of the leading medical man in Slane, conceived it to
be her duty to patronise Beth to the extent of an occasional formal
call, as she was the wife of a junior practitioner; and Beth duly
returned these calls, because she was determined not to make enemies
for Dan by showing any resentment for the slights she had suffered in
Slane.

Feeling depressed indoors one dreary afternoon, she set off, alone as
usual, to pay one of these visits. She rather hoped perhaps to find
some sort of satisfaction by way of reward for the brave discharge of
an uncongenial duty.

On the way into town, Dan passed her in his dogcart with a casual nod,
bespattering her with mud. "You'll have your carriage soon, please
God! and never have to walk. I hate to see a delicate woman on foot in
the mud." Beth remembered the words so well, and Dan's pious
intonation as he uttered them, and she laughed. She had a special
little laugh for exhibitions of this kind of divergence between Dan's
precepts and his practices. But even as she laughed her face
contracted as with a sudden spasm of pain, and she ejaculated--"But I
shall succeed!"

Mrs. Carne was at home, and Beth was shown into the drawing-room,
where she found several other lady visitors--Mrs. Kilroy, Mrs. Orton
Beg, Lady Fulda Guthrie, and Ideala. The last two she had not met
before.

"Where will you sit?" said Mrs. Carne, who was an effusive little
person. "What a day! You were brave to come out, though perhaps it
will do you good. My husband says go out in all weathers and battle
with the breeze; there's nothing like exercise."

"Battling with the breeze and an umbrella on a wet day is not
exercise, it is exasperation," Beth answered, and at the sound of her
peculiarly low, clear, cultivated voice, the conversation stopped
suddenly, and every one in the room looked at her. She seemed unaware
of the attention. In fact, she ignored every one