to have a game of cribbage with Mrs.
Caldwell. Beth was sleepy and had gone to bed early. In the pauses of
the game they talked about her, and the responsibilities of a family.

"A girl wants some one to look after her," the doctor said,
"especially if she has money."

"Yes, indeed," Mrs. Caldwell replied, "girls are a great anxiety. Now
a boy you can put into a profession and have done with it. But it is
not so easy to find a suitable husband for a girl."

"But, of course, if she has a little money it makes a difference," he
observed. "Only she should have some one to advise her in the spending
of it. Now, Miss Beth, for instance, will be as much a child at
twenty-one in money matters as she is now."

"I hope we shall find the right man for her before then," Mrs.
Caldwell answered archly; "not that I think her aunt's fortune will
cause her much anxiety." She alluded to the smallness of the sum.

"She gets some of the interest, I suppose, to go on with," he said.

"Just enough to dress on."

Beth saw a great deal of Dr. Dan after that. She was not in the least
in love with him, but they became intimate all the sooner on that
account. A girl shrinks more shyly from a man she loves than from one
for whom she has only a liking; in the one case every womanly instinct
is on the alert, in the other her feeling is not strong enough to seem
worth curbing. Beth was fond of men's companionship, and Dr. Dan's
assiduous attentions enlivened her, made her brain active, and brought
the vision and the dream within reach; so that she moved in a happy
light, but considered the source of it no more than she would have
considered the stick that held the candle by which she read an
entrancing book.

There are idyllic gleams in all interesting lives; but life as we live
it from day to day is not idyllic. In Beth's case there was the
inevitable friction, the shocks and jars of difficulties and
disagreements with her mother. These had been suspended for a time
after her return, but began to break out again, fomented very often by
Bernadine, who was always her mother's favourite, but was never a
pleasant child. Dr. Dan came one very wet day, and found Beth sitting
in the drawing-room alone, looking miserable. She had done all her
little self-imposed tasks honestly, but had reaped no reward. On the
contrary, there had come upon her a dreadful vision of herself doing
that sort of thing on always into old age, as Aunt Victoria did her