lled with remorse for that
mis-spent night, and was received with the feeble flicker of a smile,
which so touched and softened him that he made more of the new child,
and took a greater interest in her than he had done in any of the
others at the time of their birth. There was some difficulty about a
name for her. Her father proposed to call her Elizabeth--after his
sister, he said--but Mrs. Caldwell objected. Elizabeth was Miss
Gottley's name also, a fact which she recollected, but did not
mention. That she did not like the name seemed reason enough for not
choosing it; but her husband persisted, and then there was a hot
dispute on the subject above the baby's cradle. The dispute ended in a
compromise, the mother agreeing to have the child christened Elizabeth
if she were not called so; and she would not have her called Eliza,
Elsie, Elspeth, Bessie, Betsy, or Bess either. This left nothing for
it but to call her Beth, and upon consideration both parents liked the
diminutive, her father because it was unaccustomed, and her mother
because it had no association of any kind attached to it.

For the first three months of her life Beth cried incessantly, as if
bewailing her advent. Then, one day, she opened her eyes wide, and
looked out into the world with interest.

CHAPTER II

It was the sunshine really that first called her into conscious
existence, the blessed heat and light; up to the moment that she
recognised these with a certain acknowledgment of them, and consequently
of things in general outside herself, she had been as unconscious as a
white grub without legs. But that moment roused her, calling forth from
her senses their first response in the thrill of warmth and well-being
to which she awoke, and quickening her intellect at the same time with
the stimulating effort to discover from whence her comfort came. She
could remember no circumstance in connection with this earliest
awakening. All she knew of it was the feeling of warmth and brightness,
which she said recurred to her at odd times ever afterwards, and could
be recalled at will.

Some may see in this first awakening a foreshadowing of the fact that
she was born to be a child of light, and to live in it; and certainly
it was always light for which she craved, the actual light of day,
however; but nothing she yearned for ever came to her in the form she
thought of, and thus, when she asked for sunshine it was grudgingly
given, fate often forcin