Bee Belknap was a born aristocrat, and some of the bluest blood of Boston was in her veins. Indeed, she traced her pedigree back to Miles Standish on her father’s side, while her mother came straight down from a Scottish earl, who married the rector’s daughter. She was proud of her birth, and the training she had received at home and abroad had tended to increase this pride, and it was hard for her to understand just how people like Roxie Fleming could stand on the same social platform with herself. She knew they did, but she rebelled against it, and for a moment Josephine’s cause was in danger of being lost so far as she was concerned. She had thought of her as probably the daughter of some poor, but highly respectable farmer, or mechanic, whose mother took boarders, as many women do to make a little money, and whose daughters, perhaps, stitched shoes or made bonnets, as New England girls often do, but now that she knew the truth she stood for a moment aghast, and then, her strong, sensible nature asserted itself and whispered to her, “a man’s a man for a’ that.” Josephine was no more to blame for the accident of her birth than was she, Beatrice Belknap, to be praised for hers. “I’ll stand by her all the same,” she said to herself, but she did not urge quite so strenuously upon Everard the necessity of telling his father at once, for she felt sure the irascible judge would leave no stone unturned to ascertain who his daughter-in-law was, and that the ascertaining would result even worse than Everard feared. “It may be better to keep silent a little longer,” she said, and meanwhile she’d turn the matter over in her own mind and see what she could do to help him. “But in order to have any peace at home I must tell father that you refused me,” Everard said, “and I have not yet gone through the farce of offering myself, or you of refusing the offer.” Then, with the ghost of a smile on his face he arose, and standing before Beatrice, continued: “Bee, will you marry me?” “No, Everard, I will not,” was Bee’s reply, as she, too, rose, and looked at him, with eyes in which the hot tears gathered swiftly, while there came to her suddenly a feeling that she had lost something which had been very dear to her, and that her intercourse with Everard could never again be just what it had been. It is true, she had never seriously thought of him as her future husband, but she knew that others had thought it, and with his words, “Bee, will you marry me?” it came to her with a great shock that possibly, under other circumstances, she might have answered yes. But all that was over now. He had put a bar between them, and by neither word nor look must she tempt him to cross it; so, brushing her tears away with a quick, impatient gesture, and forcing a merry laugh, which sounded not unlike a hysterical sob, she said, “What children we are, Everard.”