“No one so able, Mrs. Denbigh.  I have observed many qualities in you—­observed when, perhaps, you have little thought it.”

If he had observed Ruth that morning he would have seen an absence of mind and depression of spirits not much to her credit as a teacher; for she could not bring herself to feel that she had any right to go into the family purposely to watch over and find fault with any one member of it.  If she had seen anything wrong in Jemima, Ruth loved her so much that she would have told her of it in private; and with many doubts, how far she was the one to pull out the mote from any one’s eye, even in the most tender manner;—­she would have had to conquer reluctance before she could have done even this; but there was something indefinably repugnant to her in the manner of acting which Mr. Bradshaw had proposed, and she determined not to accept the invitations which were to place her in so false a position.

But as she was leaving the house, after the end of the lessons, while she stood in the hall tying on her bonnet, and listening to the last small confidences of her two pupils, she saw Jemima coming in through the garden-door, and was struck by the change in her looks.  The large eyes, so brilliant once, were dim and clouded; the complexion sallow and colourless; a lowering expression was on the dark brow, and the corners of her mouth drooped as with sorrowful thoughts.  She looked up, and her eyes met Ruth’s.

“Oh! you beautiful creature!” thought Jemima, “with your still, calm, heavenly face, what are you to know of earth’s trials?  You have lost your beloved by death—­but that is a blessed sorrow; the sorrow I have pulls me down and down, and makes me despise and hate every one—­not you, though.”  And, her face changing to a soft, tender look, she went up to Ruth and kissed her fondly; as if it were a relief to be near some one on whose true, pure heart she relied.  Ruth returned the caress; and even while she did so, she suddenly rescinded her resolution to keep clear of what Mr. Bradshaw had desired her to do.  On her way home she resolved, if she could, to find out what were Jemima’s secret feelings; and if (as, from some previous knowledge, she suspected) they were morbid and exaggerated in any way, to try and help her right with all the wisdom which true love gives.  It was time that some one should come to still the storm in Jemima’s turbulent heart, which was daily and hourly knowing less and less of peace.  The irritating difficulty was to separate the two characters, which at two different times she had attributed to Mr. Farquhar—­the old one, which she had formerly believed to be true, that he was a man acting up to a high standard of lofty principle, and acting up without a struggle (and this last had been the circumstance which had made her rebellious and irritable once); the new one, which her father had excited in her suspicious mind, that Mr. Farquhar was cold and calculating in all