This kind of life went on till Beatrix was ten, Mr. and Mrs. Harefield’s sojourn at the Water House growing briefer each year, and by degrees there arose a feeling in Little Yafford that Mr. and Mrs. Harefield were not quite the happiest couple in the world, that there were more clouds than sunshine in that small home circle. These things make themselves known somehow. It was hinted that there were quarrels. Mrs. Harefield had a distressed look sometimes. Beatrix was rarely found in the drawing-room with her mother when people called. Good-natured Mrs. Dulcimer discovered that the little girl was always cooped up in the schoolroom, or sent out for dreary walks with her governess, and felt herself called upon to interfere and draw Mrs. Harefield’s attention to this neglect of maternal duty; but Mrs. Harefield, mildly graceful as she was at all times, received the remonstrance with a placid dignity which rebuked the good-natured busybody. There was trouble of some kind evidently at the Water House, but no one in Little Yafford could ever get face to face with the skeleton. Italian friends of Mrs. Harefield’s appeared upon the scene, but Little Yafford was not invited to meet these foreigners. Then came autumn, and another migration to warmer lands, and this time Miss Scales and Beatrix went with the travellers. ‘That is more as it should be,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, triumphantly. ‘So you see, after all, Clement, my remonstrance had some effect.’ ‘If ever I find that any act of interference with other people’s conduct of their own affairs has a good effect, I will reverse the whole theory of morals which I have made for myself in relation to my neighbour,’ answered Mr. Dulcimer, with unaccustomed energy. This last journey was fatal. Six weeks after the travellers left the Water House, Little Yafford was startled by the tidings of Mrs. Harefield’s death. She had died suddenly, at a little roadside inn in the Apennines, the loneliest spot of earth she could well have found for life’s closing scene. She had gone there alone with her husband on their way from Venice to Rome, leaving Beatrix and her governess at Venice. Mr. Harefield was distracted, and had gone off to wander no one knew where, after sending his child and the governess home to the Water House. Little Beatrix appeared there by and by, a silent and almost ghost-like child, whose small face looked unnaturally white above the dense blackness of her frock. ‘It’s absolutely heart-rending to see a Christian gentleman’s child look so like one’s idea of a vampire,’ exclaimed compassionate Mrs. Dulcimer, and she tried to lure the little girl to the Vicarage with a view to petting and making her happy; but Miss Scales guarded her pupil as jealously as if she had been a griffin in a fairy tale keeping watch and ward over an enchanted princess.