t done," to which
Beth so readily responded. Mildred was studious; she had profited by
the good teaching she had had while her father was alive, and was able
to "make things out" for herself; but she cultivated her mind at the
expense of her body. She was one of those delicate, nervous, sensitive
girls, whose busy brains require the rest of regular manual exercise;
and for want of it, she lived upon books, and very literally died of
them eventually. She was naturally, so to speak, an artificial product
of conventional ideas; Beth, on the contrary, was altogether a little
human being, but one of those who answer to expectation with fatal
versatility. She liked blacking grates, and did them well, because
Harriet told her she could; she hated writing copies, and did them
disgracefully, because her mother beat her for a blot, and said she
would never improve. For the same reason, long before she could read
aloud to her mother intelligibly, she had learnt all that Harriet
could teach her, not only of the house-work, but of the cooking, from
cleaning a fish and trussing a fowl to making barley-broth and
puff-pastry. Harriet was a good cook if she had the things, as she
said herself, having picked up a great deal when she was kitchen-maid
in Uncle James's household.

Harriet was the daughter of a labourer. Her people lived at a village
some miles away, and every Saturday morning a carrier with a covered
cart brought her a letter from home, and a little parcel containing a
cheesecake or some other dainty. Beth took a lively interest both in
the cheesecake and the letter. "What's the news from home to-day?" she
would ask. "How's Annie, and what has mother sent?" Whereupon Harriet
would share the cheesecake with her, and read the letter aloud, work
being suspended as long as possible for the purpose.

Harriet was about twenty-five at this time. She had very black silky
hair, straight and heavy, parted in the middle, drawn down over her
ears, and gathered up in a knot behind. Her face was oval, forehead
high, eyebrows arched and delicate, nose straight, and she had large
expressive dark grey eyes, rather deeply set, with long black lashes,
and a mouth that would have been handsome of the sensual full-lipped
kind, had it not been distorted by a burn, which had disfigured her
throat and chin as well. She had set her pinafore on fire when she was
a child, and it had blazed up under her chin, causing irreparable
injury before the fl