e silvery laugh of fiction, but the soundless laugh of good society,
marked the class to which she belonged; and as he stumbled along
beside her, her new acquaintance wondered how it happened that she was
at once so well-bred and so shabbily dressed. He began to question her
guardedly.

"Do you know Rainharbour well?" he asked.

"I live here," Beth answered.

"Then I suppose you know every one in the place," he pursued.

"Oh, no," she rejoined. "I know very few people, except my own, of
course."

"Which is considered the principal family here?" he asked.

"The Benyon family is the biggest and the wickedest, I should think,"
she answered casually.

"But I meant the most important," he explained, smiling.

"I don't know," she said. "Uncle James Patten thinks that next to
himself the Benyons are. He married one of them. He's an awful snob."

"And what is his position?"

"I don't know--he's a landowner; that's his estate over there," and
she nodded towards Fairholm.

"Indeed! How far does it extend?"

"From the sea right up to the hills there, and a little way beyond."

They had left the rocks by this time, and were toiling up the steep
road into the town. When they reached the top, Beth exclaimed
abruptly, "I am late! I must fly!" and leaving her companion without
further ceremony, turned down a side street and ran home.

When she got in, she wondered what had become of Alfred and Dicksie,
and she was conscious of a curious sort of suspense, which, however,
did not amount to anxiety. It was as if she were waiting and listening
for something she expected to hear, which would explain in words what
she held already inarticulate in some secret recess of her being--held
in suspense and felt, but had not yet apprehended in the region of
thought. There are people who collect and hold in themselves some
knowledge of contemporary events as the air collects and holds
moisture; it may be that we all do, but only one here and there
becomes aware of the fact. As the impalpable moisture in the air
changes to palpable rain so does this vague cognisance become a
comprehensible revelation by being resolved into a shower of words on
occasion by some process psychically analogous to the condensation of
moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon known to babes like
Beth, but ill-observed, and not at all explained, because man has gone
such a little way beyond the bogey of the supernatural in psychical
matters that he is