old my
tongue for the future when I can't say what you want me to say," Beth
answered cheerfully. "I came home to be a comfort to you, and if I
can't be a comfort to you and express myself as well, why, I must go
unexpressed."

"Now, there you are again, Beth," Mrs. Caldwell cried peevishly. "Is
that a nice thing to say?"

Beth looked at her mother and smiled enigmatically. Then she
reflected. Then her countenance cleared.

"Mamma," she said, "your hair is much whiter than it was; but I don't
think I ever saw you look so nice. You have such a pretty complexion,
and so few wrinkles, and such even teeth! What a handsome girl you
must have been!"

Mrs. Caldwell smiled complacently, and went to bed in high good
humour. She told Bernadine, as they undressed, that she thought Beth
greatly improved.

But Beth herself lay long awake that night; tossing and troubled,
feeling far from satisfied either with herself or anybody else.

The next morning she rose early and drew up her plan of life.

CHAPTER XXXV

As that first day at home wore on, Beth was seized with an importunate
yearning to go out, and it was with difficulty that she got through
her self-appointed tasks. She thought of the sea, the shore, the
silence and solitude, which were apt to be so soothing to her dull
senses that she ceased to perceive with them, and so passed into the
possession of her farther faculty for blissful moments. She fancied
the sea was as she best loved to have it, her favourite sea, with tiny
wavelets bringing the tide in imperceptibly over the rocks, and the
long stretch of water beyond heaving gently up to the horizon, with
smooth unruffled surface shining in the sun. When she had done her
work she fared forth to the sea, to sit by it, and feel the healthy
happy freshness of it all about her, and in herself as well. She went
to the rocks. The tide was coming in. The water, however, was not
molten silver-grey, as she had imagined it, but bright dark sapphire
blue, with crisp white crests to the waves, which were merry and
tumbled. It was the sea for an active, not for a meditative mood; its
voice called to play, rather than to that prayer of the whole being
which comes of the contemplation of its calmness; it exhilarated
instead of soothing, and made her joyous as she had not been since she
went to school. She stood long on the rocks by the water's edge,
retreating as the tide advanced, watching wave after wave curve and
hol