Beth rose slowly from the piano-stool, and followed Harriet upstairs to the bedroom at the back of the house. She was at once attracted to the open window by an uproar of voices--"the voices of children in happy play." There was a girls' day-school next door kept by the Misses Granger. Miss Granger had called on Mrs. Caldwell as soon as she was settled in her house, to beg for the honour of being allowed to educate her three little girls, and Beth had assisted at the interview with serious attention. It would have been the best thing in the world for her had she been allowed to romp and learn with that careless, happy, healthy-minded crew of respectable little plebeians; but Mrs. Caldwell would never have dreamt of sending any of her own superior brood to associate with such people, even if she could have afforded it. She politely explained to Miss Granger that she was educating her children herself for the present; and it was then, with a sickening sense of disappointment, that Beth rejected her mother's social standard, with its "vulgar exclusiveness," once for all. She hung out of the window now, heedless of Harriet's appeals to be "'elped wi' the beds," and watched the games going on in the next garden with pathetic gravity. The girls were playing rounders among the old fruit-trees on the grass-plot, with a loud accompaniment of shrieks and shouts of laughter. They tumbled up against the trees continually, and shook showers of autumn leaves down upon themselves; and then, tiring of the game, they began to pelt each other with the leaves, and laughed and shrieked still louder. Some of them looked up and made faces at Beth, but she did not acknowledge the discourtesy. She knew that they were not ladies, but did not feel, as her mother did, that this was a fault for which they should be punished, but a misfortune, rather, for which she pitied them, and she would have liked to have made it up to them by knowing them. Suddenly she remembered that Aunt Victoria was coming back that day, which was something to look forward to. She took Harriet's duster, and went to see if the old lady's room was all in order for her, and arranged as she liked it. Then she returned to the drawing-room, and sat down on the piano-stool, and rage and rebellion uprose in her heart. The piece of music still lay on the floor, and she stamped her foot on it. As she did so, her mother came into the room. "Do you know your lesson?" she demanded. "No, I do not," said Beth, and then she doubled her fist, and brought it down bang on the keyboard. "How dare you!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed, startled by the vehemence of the blow, and jarred by the discordant cry of the poor piano. "I felt I _must_--I felt I must make something suffer," said Beth, in a deep chest-voice and with knitted brows, twisting her fingers and rising to face her mother as she spoke; "and if I had not struck the piano, I should have struck _you_."