“Where’s Miss Benson?” asked Sally gruffly.

“Gone out with Mr. Benson,” answered Ruth, with an absent sadness in her voice and manner.  Her tears, scarce checked while she spoke, began to fall afresh; and as Sally stood and gazed she saw the babe look hack in his mother’s face, and his little lip begin to quiver, and his open blue eye to grow overclouded, as with some mysterious sympathy with the sorrowful face bent over him.  Sally took him briskly from his mother’s arms; Ruth looked up in grave surprise, for in truth she had forgotten Sally’s presence, and the suddenness of the motion startled her.

“My bonny boy! are they letting the salt tears drop on thy sweet face before thou’rt weaned!  Little somebody knows how to be a mother—­I could make a better myself.  ’Dance, thumbkin, dance—­dance, ye merry men every one.’  Ay, that’s it! smile, my pretty.  Any one but a child like thee,” continued she, turning to Ruth, “would have known better than to bring ill-luck on thy babby by letting tears fall on its face before it was weaned.  But thou’rt not fit to have a babby, and so I’ve said many a time.  I’ve a great mind to buy thee a doll, and take thy babby mysel’.”

Sally did not look at Ruth, for she was too much engaged in amusing the baby with the tassel of the string to the window-blind, or else she would have seen the dignity which the mother’s soul put into Ruth at that moment.  Sally was quelled into silence by the gentle composure, the self-command over her passionate sorrow, which gave to Ruth an unconscious grandeur of demeanour as she came up to the old servant.

“Give him back to me, please.  I did not know it brought ill-luck, or if my heart broke I would not have let a tear drop on his face—­I never will again.  Thank you, Sally,” as the servant relinquished him to her who came in the name of a mother.  Sally watched Ruth’s grave, sweet smile, as she followed up Sally’s play with the tassel, and imitated, with all the docility inspired by love, every movement and sound which had amused her babe.

“Thou’lt be a mother, after all,” said Sally, with a kind of admiration of the control which Ruth was exercising over herself.  “But why talk of thy heart breaking?  I don’t question thee about what’s past and gone; but now thou’rt wanting for nothing, nor thy child either; the time to come is the Lord’s and in His hands; and yet thou goest about a-sighing and a-moaning in a way that I can’t stand or thole.”

“What do I do wrong?” said Ruth; “I try to do all I can.”

“Yes, in a way,” said Sally, puzzled to know how to describe her meaning.  “Thou dost it—­but there’s a right and a wrong way of setting about everything—­and to my thinking, the right way is to take a thing up heartily, if it is only making a bed.  Why! dear ah me, making a bed may be done after a Christian fashion, I take it, or else what’s to come of such as me in heaven, who’ve had little enough time