He smiled back upon her as he left the room, but she would rather he had looked sad.  That smile—­she could never forget it, with its wonderful sweetness and sorrow.

She sat motionless for a while after he left the room.  She felt thrilled and numbed.  There are moments in life when souls stand forth from their clayey frames and touch each other, forgetful of time and space.  It was one of those experiences that Beth had just passed through.  She went to her room and crouched down at her window beneath the stars of that autumn night.  Poor Arthur!  She was so sad over it all.  And he had loved her!  How strange!  How could it have been?  Loved her since they were children, he had said.  She had never thought of love coming like that.  And they had played together upon that meadow out there.  They had grown up together, and he had even lived in her home those few years before he went to college.  No, she had never dreamed of marrying Arthur!  But oh, he was wounded so!  She had never seen him look like that before.  And he had hoped that she would share his life and his labor.  She thought how he had pictured her far away under the burning sun of Palestine, bathing his heated brow and cheering him for fresh effort.  He had pictured, perhaps, a little humble home, quiet and peaceful, somewhere amid the snow-crested mountains of the East, where he would walk with her in the cool of night-fall, under the bright stars and clear sky of that distant land.  Poor, mistaken Arthur!  She was not fitted for such a life, she thought.  They were never made for each other.  Their ambitions were not the same.  She had found her counterpart in Clarence, and he understood her as Arthur never could have done.  Arthur was a grand, good, practical man, but there was nothing of the artist-soul in him, she thought.  But she had hoped that he would always be her own and Clarence’s friend.  He was such a noble friend!  And now her hope was crushed.  She could never be the same to him again, she knew, and he had said farewell.

“Good-bye, Beth—­little Beth,” he had said, and she lingered over the last two words, “little Beth.”  Yes, she would be “little Beth” to him, forever now, the little Beth that he had loved and roamed with over meadow and woodland and wayside, in the sunny, bygone days.

“Good-bye, Beth—­little Beth.”  Poor Arthur!

CHAPTER VI.

’VARSITY.

Friday morning came, the last day of September, and the train whistled sharply as it steamed around the curve from Briarsfield with Beth at one of the car-windows.  It had almost choked her to say good-bye to her father at the station, and she was still straining her eyes to catch the last glimpse of home.  She could see the two poplars at the gate almost last of all, as the train bore her out into the open country.  She looked through her tears at the fields and hills, the stretches of woodland and the old farm-houses, with the vines clambering over their porches, and the tomatoes ripening in the kitchen window-sills.  Gradually the tears dried, for there is pleasure always in travelling through Western Ontario, particularly on the lake-side, between Hamilton and Toronto.