CHAPTER I.

BETH AT EIGHTEEN.

In the good old county of Norfolk, close to the shore of Lake Erie, lies the pretty village of Briarsfield.  A village I call it, though in truth it has now advanced almost to the size and dignity of a town.  Here, on the brow of the hill to the north of the village (rather a retired spot, one would say, for so busy a man), at the time of which my story treats, stood the residence of Dr. Woodburn.

It was a long, old-fashioned rough-cast house facing the east, with great wide windows on each side of the door and a veranda all the way across the front.  The big lawn was quite uneven, and broken here and there by birch trees, spruces, and crazy clumps of rose-bushes, all in bloom.  Altogether it was a sweet, home-like old place.  The view to the south showed, over the village roofs on the hill-side, the blue of Lake Erie outlined against the sky, while to the north stretched the open, undulating country, so often seen in Western Ontario.

One warm June afternoon Beth, the doctor’s only daughter, was lounging in an attitude more careless than graceful under a birch tree.  She, her father and Mrs. Margin, the housekeeper—­familiarly known as Aunt Prudence—­formed the whole household.  Beth was a little above the average height, a girlish figure, with a trifle of that awkwardness one sometimes meets in an immature girl of eighteen; a face, not what most people would call pretty, but still having a fair share of beauty.  Her features were, perhaps, a little too strongly outlined, but the brow was fair as a lily, and from it the great mass of dark hair was drawn back in a pleasing way.  But her eyes—­those earnest, grey eyes—­were the most impressive of all in her unusually impressive face.  They were such searching eyes, as though she had stood on the brink scanning the very Infinite, and yet with a certain baffled look in them as of one who had gazed far out, but failed to pierce the gloom—­a beaten, longing look.  But a careless observer might have dwelt longer on the affectionate expression about her lips—­a half-childish, half-womanly tenderness.

Beth was in one of her dreamy moods that afternoon.  She was gazing away towards the north, her favorite view.  She sometimes said it was prettier than the lake view.  The hill on which their house stood sloped abruptly down, and a meadow, pink with clover, stretched far away to rise again in a smaller hill skirted with a bluish line of pines.  There was a single cottage on the opposite side of the meadow, with white blinds and a row of sun-flowers along the wall; but Beth was not absorbed in the view, and gave no heed to the book beside her.  She was dreaming.  She had just been reading the life of George Eliot, her favorite author, and the book lay open at her picture.  She had begun to love George Eliot like a personal friend; she was her ideal, her model, for Beth had some repute as a literary character in Briarsfield.