for so busy a man), at the time of which my story treats,
stood the residence of Dr. Woodburn.

It was a long, old-fashioned rough-cast house facing the east, with
great wide windows on each side of the door and a veranda all the way
across the front. The big lawn was quite uneven, and broken here and
there by birch trees, spruces, and crazy clumps of rose-bushes, all in
bloom. Altogether it was a sweet, home-like old place. The view to the
south showed, over the village roofs on the hill-side, the blue of Lake
Erie outlined against the sky, while to the north stretched the open,
undulating country, so often seen in Western Ontario.

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. She was gazing away
towards the north, her favorite view. She sometimes said it was prettier
than the lake view. The hill on which their house stood sloped abruptly
down, and a meadow, pink with clover, stretched far away to rise again
in a smaller hill skirted with a bluish line of pines. There was a
single cottage on the opposite side of the meadow, with white blinds and
a row of sun-flowers along the wall; but Beth was not absorbed in the
view, and gave no heed to the book beside her. She was dreaming. She had
just been reading the life of George Eliot, her favorite author, and the
book lay open at her picture. She had begun to love