Bee and Sister Rhoda Ann Baker were the very best of friends, and more than once Rhoda Ann’s plain Nazarite bonnet had been seen in the little phaeton side by side with Bee’s stylish Paris hat, on which the good woman scarcely dared to look lest it should move her from her serene height of plainness and humility. In spite of her faults, Beatrice was very popular, and nowhere was she more welcome than at the Forrest House, where she was beloved by Mrs. Forrest and worshiped by Rossie as a kind of divinity, though she did not quite like all she did and said. Offers, many and varied, Beatrice had had, both at home and abroad. She might have been the wife of a senator. She might have married her music-teacher and her dancing-master. She might have been a missionary and taught the Feegee Islanders how to read. She might have been a countess in Rome, a baroness in Germany, and my lady in Edinburgh, but she had said no to them all, and felt the hardest wrench when she said it to the Feegee missionary, and for aught anybody knew, was heart-whole and fancy-free when she alighted from her phaeton at the door of Forrest House the morning after Everard’s arrival. She knew he was there, and with the spirit of coquetry so much a part of herself she had made her toilet with a direct reference to this young man whom she had not seen for more than a year, and who, when joked about marrying her, had once called her _old Bee Belknap_, and wondered if any one supposed he would marry his grandmother. Miss Bee had smiled sweetly on this audacious boy who called her old and a grandmother, and had laid a wager with herself that he should some day offer himself to “old Bee Belknap,” and be refused! In case he didn’t she would build a church in Omaha and support a missionary there five years! She was much given to building churches and supporting missionaries,—this sprightly, dashing girl of twenty-one, who flashed, and sparkled, and shone in the summer sunshine, like a diamond, as she threw her reins over the backs of her two ponies, Spitfire and Starlight, and giving each of them a loving caress bade them stand still and not whisk their tails too much even if the flies did bite them. Then, with ribbons and laces streaming from her on all sides, she went fluttering up the steps and into the broad hall where Everard met her.