latter did not understand, and could not arrange and comprehend.  She was like a child who gets a few pieces of a dissected map, and is confused until a glimpse of the whole unity is shown him.  Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw were the centre pieces in Ruth’s map; their children, their servants, were the accessories; and one or two other names were occasionally mentioned.  Ruth wondered and almost wearied at Miss Benson’s perseverance in talking to her about people whom she did not know; but, in truth, Miss Benson heard the long-drawn, quivering sighs which came from the poor heavy heart, when it was left to silence, and had leisure to review the past; and her quick accustomed ear caught also the low mutterings of the thunder in the distance, in the shape of Sally’s soliloquies, which, like the asides at a theatre, were intended to be heard.  Suddenly, Miss Benson called Ruth out of the room upstairs into her own bed-chamber, and then began rummaging in little old-fashioned boxes, drawn out of an equally old-fashioned bureau, half-desk, half-table, and wholly drawers.

“My dear, I’ve been very stupid and thoughtless.  Oh!  I’m so glad I thought of it before Mrs. Bradshaw came to call.  Here it is!” and she pulled out an old wedding-ring, and hurried it on Ruth’s finger.  Ruth hung down her head, and reddened deep with shame; her eyes smarted with the hot tears that filled them.  Miss Benson talked on, in a nervous hurried way—­

“It was my grandmother’s; it’s very broad; they made them so then, to hold a posy inside:  there’s one in that—­

‘Thine own sweetheart Till death doth part,’

I think it is.  There, there!  Run away, and look as if you’d always worn it.”  Ruth went up to her room, and threw herself down on her knees by the bedside, and cried as if her heart would break; and then, as if a light had come down into her soul, she calmed herself and prayed—­no words can tell how humbly, and with what earnest feeling.  When she came down, she was tearstained and wretchedly pale; but even Sally looked at her with new eyes, because of the dignity with which she was invested by an earnestness of purpose which had her child for its object.  She sat and thought, but she no longer heaved those bitter sighs which had wrung Miss Benson’s heart in the morning.  In this way the day wore on; early dinner, early tea seemed to make it preternaturally long to Ruth; the only event was some unexplained absence of Sally’s, who had disappeared out of the house in the evening, much to Miss Benson’s surprise, and somewhat to her indignation.

At night, after Ruth had gone up to her room, this absence was explained to her at least.  She had let down her long waving glossy hair, and was standing absorbed in thought in the middle of the room, when she heard a round clumping knock at her door, different from that given by the small knuckles of delicate fingers, and in walked Sally, with a judge-like severity of demeanour, holding in her hand two widow’s caps of commonest make and coarsest texture.  Queen Eleanor herself, when she presented the bowl to Fair Rosamond, had not a more relentless purpose stamped on her demeanour than had Sally at this moment.  She walked up to the beautiful, astonished Ruth, where she stood in her long, soft, white dressing-gown, with all her luxuriant brown hair hanging dishevelled down her figure, and thus Sally spoke—­