wrong thing,
it doesn't accuse me; when it does, I stop and repent."

She was sitting beside the dining-table, balancing a pencil on her
finger as she spoke.

"Look at you now, Beth," her mother ejaculated, "utterly callous!"

Beth sighed, and put the pencil down. She despaired of ever making her
mother understand anything, and determined not to try again.

"Beth, I don't know what to do with you," Mrs. Caldwell recommenced
after a long silence. "I've been warned again and again that I should
have trouble with you, and Heaven knows I have. You've done a
monstrous thing, and, instead of being terrified when you're found
out, you sit there coolly discussing it, as if you were a grown-up
person. And then you're so queer. You ought to be a child, but you're
not. Lady Benyon likes you; but even she says you're not a child, and
never were. You say things no sane child would ever think of, and very
few grown-up people. You are _not_ like other people, there's no
denying it."

Beth's eyes filled with tears. To be thought unlike other people was
the one thing that made her quail.

"Well, mamma, what am I to do?" she said. "I hate to vex you, goodness
knows; but I must be doing something. The days are long and dreary."
She wiped her eyes. "When people warned you that you would have
trouble with me, they always said unless you sent me to school."

Mrs. Caldwell rocked herself on her chair forlornly. "School would do
you no good," she declared at last. "No, Beth, you are my cross, and I
must bear it. If I forgive you again this time, will you be a better
girl in future?"

"I don't believe it's my fault that I ever annoy you," Beth answered
drily.

"Whose fault is it, then?" her mother demanded.

Beth shrugged her shoulders and began to balance the pencil on her
fingers once more.

Mrs. Caldwell got up and stood looking at her for a little with a
gathering expression of dislike on her face which it was not good to
see; then she went towards the door.

"You are incorrigible," she ejaculated as she opened it, making the
remark to cover her retreat.

Beth sighed heavily, then resolved herself into a Christian martyr,
cruelly misjudged--an idea which she pursued with much satisfaction to
herself for the rest of the day.

In consequence of that conversation with her mother, when the evening
came her conscience accused her, and she made no attempt to go out.
She was to meet Alfred and Dicksie on Saturday, their next
ha