one unmeaning incident to another and entered into a series of artificial flirtations with men who had no scruples and one passion simply in order to kill time. Her carelessness led her into episodes, the merest hint of which would have thrown dear little Mrs. Guthrie into a panic, and her coolness permitted her to escape from them with perhaps more ingenuity than dignity. Even upon her return from England with her heart full of Nicholas Kenyon, and with a desire to see him again that kept her awake at night, she frittered away her superfluous energy with this Harry Spearman, whom no woman with any respect for her daughter would willingly allow within a mile of her, even if properly chaperoned. Betty, being one of those girls who had never been suspected of any talent, but who nevertheless had it in her to perform a far more womanly and beautiful thing than to write books or plays--to be in fact a good wife to the man she loved and a good mother to his children--looked at Belle's way of living with growing anxiety. She was not a prude or a prig. She had not been allowed out in the world with eyes all curious to see the truth of things through a veil of false modesty. Her father, a wise and humane man, had seen to that. She delighted in enjoyment, went to the theatre whenever she had the opportunity and danced herself out of shoes. But, not being ambitious to shine, she was content to apply her energy to the ordinary work that came to her to do,--the practical, everyday, undramatic, domestic things that cropped up hourly in the strange house where the father was an artist and the mother suffered from individualism and was a leader of new movements. Leaving school to find a home in a constant state of chaos, her father rarely out of his studio, her mother always in the throes of committee meetings and speech-making,--she knuckled down to set it in order, to clear out an extravagant cook with an appetite for hysterics, and a sloppy Irish waitress whose hairpins fell everywhere and whose loose hand dropped things of value almost before it touched them. This done she found others and appointed herself housekeeper, and the duties of this position kept her both busy and happy,--the one being hyphenated to the other. But even if her father had been, like Dr. Guthrie, a rich man instead of one who lived up to every penny that he earned and generally several thousand dollars beyond, she had nothing in her character that, however little she was occupied, would have allowed her to look at life from the modern standpoint of Belle and her other friends. She was--and rejoiced in the fact--old-fashioned. Most of her ideas were what is now scoffingly called "early Victorian," because they were not loose and careless, and the many things that Belle and others found "fearfully amusing" were, to her, impossible. She didn't, for instance, leave her petticoat in the cloak-room when she went to dances, so that her partners might find her better fun.