It was very still; for the house, with its half-dozen acres, lay in an angle of the hills, looking out on the river, which shut out all distant noises.  Only the men’s footsteps broke the silence, passing and repassing the window.  Without, the October starlight lay white and frosty on the moors, the old barn, the sharp, dark hills, and the river, which was half hidden by the orchard.  One could hear it, like some huge giant moaning in his sleep, at times, and see broad patches of steel blue glittering through the thick apple-trees and the bushes.  Her mother had fallen into a doze.  Margaret looked at her, thinking how sallow the plump, fair face had grown, and how faded the kindly blue eyes were now.  Dim with crying,—­she knew that, though she never saw her shed a tear.  Always cheery and quiet, going placidly about the house in her gray dress and Quaker cap, as if there were no such things in the world as debt or blindness.  But Margaret knew, though she said nothing.  When her mother came in from those wonderful foraging expeditions in search of late pease or corn, she could see the swollen circle round the eyes, and hear her breath like that of a child which has sobbed itself tired.  Then, one night, when she had gone late into her mother’s room, the blue eyes were set in a wild, hopeless way, as if staring down into years of starvation and misery.  The fire on the hearth burned low and clear; the old worn furniture stood out cheerfully in the red glow, and threw a maze of twisted shadow on the floor.  But the glow was all that was cheerful.  To-morrow, when the hard daylight should jeer away the screening shadows, it would unbare a desolate, shabby home.  She knew; struck with the white leprosy of poverty; the blank walls, the faded hangings, the old stone house itself, looking vacantly out on the fields with a pitiful significance of loss.  Upon the mantel-shelf there was a small marble figure, one of the Dancing Graces:  the other two were gone, gone in pledge.  This one was left, twirling her foot, and stretching out her hands in a dreary sort of ecstasy, with no one to respond.  For a moment, so empty and bitter seemed her home and her life, that she thought the lonely dancer with her flaunting joy mocked her,—­taunted them with the slow, gray desolation that had been creeping on them for years.  Only for a moment the morbid fancy hurt her.

The red glow was healthier, suited her temperament better.  She chose to fancy the house as it had been once,—­should be again, please God.  She chose to see the old comfort and the old beauty which the poor schoolmaster had gathered about their home.  Gone now.  But it should return.  It was well, perhaps, that he was blind, he knew so little of what had come on them.  There, where the black marks were on the wall, there had hung two pictures.  Margaret and her father religiously believed them to be a Tintoret and Copley.  Well, they were gone now.  He had been used to dust them with a light brush every morning, himself, but now he said,—­