“Flo is a fool to saddle her child with a name she hates,” Miss McPherson thought, but she consented to act as sponsor, and wore her best black silk in honor of the occasion, when Sunday came and she took her accustomed seat in church.

But her thoughts were evidently not upon the service, for she knelt in the wrong place, and once said aloud in her abstraction, “Let us pray,” and there was a twinkle in her round bright eyes, and a grim smile on her face when she at last arose, and straight and stiff as a darning-needle walked up the aisle, and took in her arms the little pink and white baby who was to bear her name.  It was a pretty child, and as she held it for a moment and looked into its clear blue eyes fixed so questioningly upon her face, there came to her the thought of another little blue-eyed girl who had come to her on the sands of Aberystwyth, and the touch of whose hands as they rubbed and patted the folds of her dress she could feel even now after the lapse of many years.  That child had said to her that Betsey was a horrid name; this child in her arms would think so, too, and hate it all her life, and when the clergyman, said, “Name this child,” she answered, in a loud, clear voice, which rang distinctly through the church: 

“Bessie McPherson!”

“No, no; oh, no!” Flora gasped in a whisper, “it is Betsey, ma’am; it is for you.”

“Hush!  I know what I am about,” was whispered back, and so Bessie McPherson, and not Betsey, was received into Christ’s flock and signed with the sign of the cross, and given to the happy mother happier than she dared to own because of the change of name.

The next day five hundred dollars were placed in the Allington Savings Bank to the credit of Bessie McPherson Bowen, and the spinster washed her hands of the whole affair, as she expressed it to herself.  But she could not quite forget the child, and when on the Monday evening after the christening she sat by her open fire with her round tea table at her side, there was a thought of it in her mind, and she said to herself: 

“I am glad I did not give it my name.  Betsey is not very poetical, and they are sure to call you Bets when they are angry at you.  Bessie is better and sweeter every way.”

And then her thoughts went over the sea after that other Bessie, her own flesh and blood, of whom she had not heard in years.  It was very seldom that her brother John wrote to her, and when he did he never mentioned Archie or his family, and so she knew nothing of them except that Daisy was still carrying on her business at Monte Carlo and was known as an adventuress to every frequenter of the place.  But where was Bessie?  Miss McPherson asked herself, us she gazed dreamily into the fire.  Was she like her mother, a vain coquette and a mark for coarse jests and vulgar admiration?

“For the girl must be pretty,” she said, “There was the promise of great beauty in that face, and true, pure womanhood, too, if only she were well brought up.”