He could have selected no way that would have hurt her more keenly.  To refuse to let her go to see the girl she loved—­ her only close friend and playmate!  And to refuse to allow Helen and Tom to come here to see her!  This intimacy was all (and Ruth admitted it now, in a torrent of tears, as she lay upon her little bed) that made life at the Red Mill endurable.  Had she not met Helen and found her such a dear girl and so kind a companion, Ruth told herself now that she never could have borne the dull existence of this house.

She heard Aunt Alvirah’s halting step upon the stair and before the old woman reached the top of the flight, Ruth plainly heard her moaning to herself:  “Oh, my back! and oh, my bones!” Thus groaning and halting, Aunt Alvirah came to Ruth’s door and pushed it open.

“Oh, deary, deary, me!” she whispered, limping into the room.  “Don’t-ee cry no more, poor lamb.  Old Aunt Alviry knows jest how it hurts—­ she wishes she could bear it for ye!  Now, now, my pretty creetur—­ don’t-ee take on so.  Things will turn out all right yet.  Don’t lose hope.”

She had reached the bed ere this and had gathered the sobbing girl into her arms.  She sat upon the side of the bed and rocked Ruth to and fro, with her arms about her.  She did not say much more, but her unspoken sympathy was wonderfully comforting.

Aunt Alvirah did not criticise Uncle Jabez’s course.  She never did.  But she gave Ruth in her sorrow all the sympathy of which her great nature was capable.  She seemed to understand just how the girl felt, without a spoken word on her part.  She did not seek to explain the miller’s reason for acting as he did.  Perhaps she had less idea than had Ruth why Jabez Potter should have taken such a violent dislike to the Camerons.

For Ruth half believed that she held the key to that mystery.  When she came to think it over afterward she put what she had heard between the two old men—­ Jabez and Parloe—­ down at the brook, with what had occurred at the mill just before Tom Cameron had come in sight; and putting these two incidents together and remembering that Jasper Parloe had overheard Tom in his delirium accuse the miller of being the cause of his injury, Ruth was pretty sure that in that combination of circumstances was the true explanation of Uncle Jabez’s cruel decision.

Ruth was not the girl to lie on her bed and weep for long.  She was sensible enough to know very well that such a display of disappointment and sorrow would not better the circumstances.  While she remained at the Red Mill she must obey Uncle Jabez, and his decisions could not be controverted.  She had never won a place near enough to the miller’s real nature to coax him, or to reason with him regarding this gruff decision he had made.  She had to make up her mind that, unless something unexpected happened to change Uncle Jabez, she was cut off from much future association with her dear chum, Helen Cameron.