Even the sunlight looked more golden when Beth stepped out into it that afternoon.  Everything had caught a tint from the pearly gates, for that hour had been a turning-point in her life.  She had found the secret of life—­the secret of putting self utterly into the background and living for others’ happiness; and they who find that secret have the key to their own happiness.  The old tinge of gloom in her grey eyes passed away, and, instead, there came into them the warmth and light of a new life.  They seemed to reach out over the whole world with tender sympathy, like a deep, placid sea, with the sunlight gilding, its depths.

“Beth, you are growing beautiful,” her father said to her one day; and there were something so reverential in his look that it touched her too deeply to make her vain.

The four weeks that remained before the first of October, when she was to return to college, passed quickly.  Clarence did not return, and she heard that he had gone to England, intending to take his degree at Cambridge.  The Ashleys, too, had left Briarsfield, as Mr. Ashley had secured a principalship east of Toronto.  Beth heard nothing more of Marie, though she would so gladly have forgiven her now!

Beth soon became quite absorbed in her new friend, May Perth.  She told her one day of her fancy that her face looked like a lily-cup.  Mrs. Perth only laughed and kissed her, in her sweet, unconscious way.  Beth always loved to kiss May Perth’s brow; it was so calm and fair, it reminded her of the white breast of a dove.

Just three or four days before Beth was to go away, Aunt Prudence came into her room at a time when she was alone.

“Did you ever see this picture that Arthur left in his room when he went away last fall?” she asked.  “I don’t know whether he did it himself or not.”

She placed it in the light and left the room.  Beth recognized it almost instantly.

“Why, it’s that poem of mine that Arthur liked best of all!” she thought.

Yes, it was the very same—­the grey rocks rising one above another, the broad white shore, and the lonely cottage, with the dark storm-clouds lowering above it, and the fisherman’s bride at the window, pale and anxious, her sunny hair falling about her shoulders as she peered far out across the sea—­the black, storm-tossed sea—­and far out among the billows the tiny speck of sail that never reached the shore.  Beth was no connoisseur of art, but she knew the picture before her was intensely beautiful, even sublime.  There was something in it that made her feel.  It moved her to tears even as Arthur’s music had done.  No need to tell her both came from the same hand.  Besides, no one else had seen that poem but Arthur.  And Arthur could paint like this, and yet she had said he had not an artist soul.  She sighed faintly.  Poor Arthur!  Perhaps, after all, she had been mistaken.  And she laid the picture carefully away among her treasures.