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 George Eliot like a
personal friend; she was her ideal, her model, for Beth had some repute
as a literary character in Briarsfield. Not a teacher in the village
school but had marked her strong literary powers, and she was not at all
slow to believe all the hopeful compliments paid her. From a child her
stories had filled columns in the Briarsfield _Echo_, and now she was
eighteen she told herself she was ready to reach out into the great
literary world--a nestling longing to soar. Yes, she would be
famous--Beth Woodburn, of Briarsfield. She was sure of it. She would
write novels; oh, such grand novels! She would drink from the very
depths of nature and human life. The stars, the daisies, sunsets,
rippling waters, love and sorrow, and all the infinite chords that
vibrate in the human soul--she would weave them all with warp of gold.
Oh, the world would see what was in her soul! She would be the bright
particular star of Canadian literature; and then wealth would flow in,