As for Beatrice, she went home, still chuckling, to receive a severe reproof from Elizabeth for her “forwardness.”  But Owen Davies never forgot the debt of gratitude he owed her.  In his heart he felt convinced that had it not been for her, he would have fled before Mrs. Thomas and her horn-rimmed eyeglasses, to return no more.  The truth of the matter was, however, that young as was Beatrice, he fell in love with her then and there, only to fall deeper and deeper into that drear abyss as years went on.  He never said anything about it, he scarcely even gave a hint of his hopeless condition, though of course Beatrice divined something of it as soon as she came to years of discretion.  But there grew up in Owen’s silent, lonely breast a great and overmastering desire to make this grey-eyed girl his wife.  He measured time by the intervals that elapsed between his visions of her.  No period in his life was so wretched and utterly purposeless as those two years which passed while she was at her Training College.  He was a very passive lover, as yet his gathering passion did not urge him to extremes, and he could never make up his mind to declare it.  The box was in his hand, but he feared to throw the dice.

But he drew as near to her as he dared.  Once he gave Beatrice a flower, it was when she was seventeen, and awkwardly expressed a hope that she would wear it for his sake.  The words were not much and the flower was not much, but there was a look about the man’s eyes, and a suppressed passion and energy in his voice, which told their tale to the keen-witted girl.  After this he found that she avoided him, and bitterly regretted his boldness.  For Beatrice did not like him in that way.  To a girl of her curious stamp his wealth was nothing.  She did not covet wealth, she coveted independence, and had the sense to know that marriage with such a man would not bring it.  A cage is a cage, whether the bars are of iron or gold.  He bored her, she despised him for his want of intelligence and enterprise.  That a man with all this wealth and endless opportunity should waste his life in such fashion was to her a thing intolerable.  She knew if she had half his chance, that she would make her name ring from one end of Europe to the other.  In short, Beatrice held Owen as deeply in contempt as her sister Elizabeth, studying him from another point of view, held him in reverence.  And putting aside any human predilections, Beatrice would never have married a man whom she despised.  She respected herself too much.

Owen Davies saw all this as through a glass darkly, and in his own slow way cast about for a means of drawing near.  He discovered that Beatrice was passionately fond of learning, and also that she had no means to obtain the necessary books.  So he threw open his library to her; it was one of the best in Wales.  He did more; he gave orders to a London bookseller to forward him every new book of importance that appeared in certain classes of literature, and