Mrs. Dulcimer felt herself baffled. This stony urbanity was too much for her. But she remembered Beatrix’s pale joyless face as she had seen it in the chancel pew last Sunday, and made one more heroic effort. ‘Mr. Harefield, I am not going to ask you to change your own habits----’ ‘That would be wasted labour, madam----’ ‘Or to ask people to the Water House----’ ‘I would not do my friends so great a wrong----’ ‘But you might at least let Beatrix come to me. We are very quiet people at the Vicarage,--Clement is absorbed in his books--I in my workbasket. There would be no gaiety for her, but there would be the change from one house to another, and we lie higher. You must be damp at the Water House. I know Beatrix has suffered from neuralgia----’ ‘A new fashion among young ladies, like the shape of their bonnets. I never heard of it when I was young----’ ‘Oh, it was called toothache then, but it was just as excruciating. Then you really will let her come?’ pursued Mrs. Dulcimer, pretending to make sure of his consent. ‘Clement Dulcimer is a gentleman I greatly respect, and you are the most amiable of women. I cannot see why I should forbid my daughter coming to you if you like to be troubled with her. But I must make it a condition that you do not take her anywhere else--that she is to come to your house and yours alone.’ ‘Most assuredly. I shall consider your wishes upon that point sacred,’ protested Mrs. Dulcimer, delighted with her success. She called on Beatrix the next day, and carried her off to the Vicarage. The girl had been carefully educated by conscientious Miss Scales, and knew everything that a girl of her age is supposed to know, except the theory of music. She could have enlightened the Vicar about latitude and longitude, and the subjunctive mood in various languages. But she had all the deficiencies and peculiarities of a girl whose life had been lonely. She was proud and shy--what the Vicar called _farouche_--and it was a long time before her new friends could set her at ease. But when she did expand they grew very fond of her, and that new life at the Vicarage was like the beginning of her youth. She had never felt herself young before. Miss Scales’ prim perfection had been like a band of iron about her life. Her father’s gloom and hardness had weighed upon her like an actual burden. She had waked in the night sobbing, startled from some dim strange dream of an impossible happiness, by the recollection that she had a father who had never loved her, who never would love her.