One warm June afternoon Beth, the doctor's only daughter, was lounging
in an attitude more careless than graceful under a birch tree. She, her
father and Mrs. Margin, the housekeeper--familiarly known as Aunt
Prudence--formed the whole household. Beth was a little above the
average height, a girlish figure, with a trifle of that awkwardness one
sometimes meets in an immature girl of eighteen; a face, not what most
people would call pretty, but still having a fair share of beauty. Her
features were, perhaps, a little too strongly outlined, but the brow was
fair as a lily, and from it the great mass of dark hair was drawn back
in a pleasing way. But her eyes--those earnest, grey eyes--were the most
impressive of all in her unusually impressive face. They were such
searching eyes, as though she had stood on the brink scanning the very
Infinite, and yet with a certain baffled look in them as of one who had
gazed far out, but failed to pierce the gloom--a beaten, longing look.
But a careless observer might have dwelt longer on the affectionate
expression about her lips--a half-childish, half-womanly tenderness.
Beth was in one of her dreamy moods that afternoon.
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