tried to outbid each other whenever an opportunity offered, and were
both fully convinced that they sighed in vain. She was so different,
they felt, from the other specimens of femininity of their acquaintance
to whom their weak attentions had sometimes proved acceptable. There was
something almost imperious in Elizabeth's manner at times that made them
feel quite small beside her; and however careless she might be of the
_convenances_ in her way of speaking to them, they had very soon found
that wherever she chose to draw the line, so far could they go and no
farther.

Madame Garvloit would take her to task sometimes for the scant courtesy
with which she treated the young clerk. Elizabeth would answer that he
bored her; and Madame Garvloit would insist that a young girl ought to
have tact enough not to make this evident. Elizabeth, however, was not
deficient in tact, but disliked putting a restraint upon her feelings;
and it seemed to her on the whole unreasonable that a person should
pretend that a thing was pleasant when in reality it was wearisome.

During the second autumn of her service with the Garvloits, the skipper,
on his return from a trip to Norway, brought the intelligence that
Lieutenant Beck was engaged to Postmaster Forstberg's daughter in
Arendal, and he had many messages for Elizabeth from the latter. They
were to be married in the spring.

Elizabeth was overjoyed to hear it, for the thought had often weighed
heavily on her mind that Carl Beck might be making himself miserable on
her account. She judged so from her own feeling for Salvé: and as she
sat alone by her window at bedtime that night, gazing out over the canal
and the shipping in the calm moonlight, the quiet afterglow of a holiday
evening seemed to have shed itself over her thoughts. She knew from her