’My darling child, I would sooner see you laid in your coffin than married to either Mr. Ryan or Mr. Lynch; but that is not the question.  It is, whether you had not better wait for a few years before you throw yourself away on such a man as Dr. Reed.  I know that you have been greatly tried; nothing is so trying to a girl as to come out with her sister who is the belle of the season, and I must say you have shown a great deal of pluck; and perhaps I haven’t been considerate enough.  But I, too, have had my disappointments—­Olive’s affairs did not, as you know, turn out as well as I had expected, and to see you now marry one who is so much beneath us!’

’Mother, dear, he is not beneath us.  There is no one who has earned his career but Dr. Reed; he owes nothing to anyone; he has done it all by his own exertions; and now he has bought a London practice.’

’Then you do not love him; it is only for the sake of settling yourself in life that you are marrying him?’

’I respect Dr. Reed more than any man living; I bear for him a most sincere affection, and I hope to make him a good wife.’

’You don’t love him as you did Mr. Harding?  If you will only wait you may get him.  The tenants are paying their rents very well, and I am thinking of going to London in the spring.’

The girl winced at the mention of Harding, but she looked into her mother’s soft appealing brown eyes; and, reading clearer than she had ever read before all the adorable falseness that lay therein, she answered: 

’I do not want to marry Mr. Harding; I am engaged to Dr. Reed, and I do not intend to give him up.’

This answer was given so firmly that Mrs. Barton lost her temper for a moment, and she said: 

’And do you really know what this Dr. Reed originally was?  Lord Dungory is dining here to-night; he knows all about Dr. Reed’s antecedents, and I am sure he will be horrified when he hears that you are thinking of marrying him.’

’I cannot recognize Lord Dungory’s right to advise me on any course I may choose to take, and I hope he will have the good taste to refrain from speaking to me of my marriage.’

’What do you mean?  How dare you speak to me like that, you impertinent girl!’

’I am not impertinent, mother, and I hope I shall never be impertinent to you; but I am now in my twenty-fifth year, and if I am ever to judge for myself, I must do so now.’

Alice was curiously surprised by her own words; it seemed to her that it was some strange woman, and not herself—­not the old self with whom she was intimately acquainted—­who was speaking.  Life is full of these epoch-marking moments.  We have all at some given time experienced the sensation of finding ourselves either stronger or weaker than we had ever before known ourselves to be; Alice now for the first time felt that she was speaking and acting in her own individual right; and the knowledge as it thrilled through her consciousness was almost