“You’ve had no tea, I guess.  Indeed, and the girls are very careless.”  She rang the bell with energy, and seconded her pull by going to the door and shouting out sharp directions, in Welsh, to Nest and Gwen, and three or four other rough, kind, slatternly servants.

They brought her tea, which was comfortable, according to the idea of comfort prevalent in that rude hospitable place; there was plenty to eat; too much indeed, for it revolted the appetite it was intended to provoke.  But the heartiness with which the kind rosy waiter pressed her to eat, and the scolding Mrs. Morgan gave her when she found the buttered toast untouched (toast on which she had herself desired that the butter might not be spared), did Ruth more good than the tea.  She began to hope, and to long for the morning when hope might have become certainty.  It was all in vain that she was told that the room she had been in all day was at her service; she did not say a word, but she was not going to bed that night of all nights in the year, when life or death hung trembling in the balance.  She went into the bedroom till the bustling house was still, and heard busy feet passing to and fro into the room she might not enter; and voices, imperious, though hushed down to a whisper, ask for innumerable things.  Then there was silence:  and when she thought that all were dead asleep, except the watchers, she stole out into the gallery.  On the other side were two windows, cut into the thick stone wall, and flower-pots were placed on the shelves thus formed, where great untrimmed, straggling geraniums grew, and strove to reach the light.  The window near Mr. Bellingham’s door was open; the soft, warm-scented night-air came sighing in in faint gusts, and then was still.  It was summer; there was no black darkness in the twenty-four hours; only the light grew dusky, and colour disappeared from objects, of which the shape and form remained distinct.  A soft grey oblong of barred light fell on the flat wall opposite to the windows, and deeper grey shadows marked out the tracery of the plants, more graceful thus than in reality.  Ruth crouched where no light fell.  She sat on the ground close by the door; her whole existence was absorbed in listening:  all was still; it was only her heart beating with the strong, heavy, regular sound of a hammer.  She wished she could stop its rushing, incessant clang.  She heard a rustle of a silken gown, and knew it ought not to have been worn in a sick-room; for her senses seemed to have passed into the keeping of the invalid, and to feel only as he felt.  The noise was probably occasioned by some change of posture in the watcher inside, for it was once more dead-still.  The soft wind outside sank with a low, long, distant moan among the windings of the hills, and lost itself there, and came no more again.  But Ruth’s heart beat loud.  She rose with as little noise as if she were a vision, and crept to the open window to try and lose the nervous listening for the ever-recurring