opened.

"She's come," whispered Mrs Morgan, looking very much excited, and
forgetting that Ruth had never heard that Mrs Bellingham had been
summoned.

"Who is come?" asked Ruth. The idea of Mrs Mason flashed through her
mind--but with a more terrible, because a more vague dread, she heard
that it was his mother; the mother of whom he had always spoken as a
person whose opinion was to be regarded more than that of any other
individual.

"What must I do? Will she be angry with me?" said she, relapsing into
her child-like dependence on others; and feeling that even Mrs Morgan
was some one to stand between her and Mrs Bellingham.

Mrs Morgan herself was a little perplexed. Her morality was rather
shocked at the idea of a proper real lady like Mrs Bellingham
discovering that she had winked at the connexion between her son and
Ruth. She was quite inclined to encourage Ruth in her inclination
to shrink out of Mrs Bellingham's observation, an inclination which
arose from no definite consciousness of having done wrong, but
principally from the representations she had always heard of the
lady's awfulness. Mrs Bellingham swept into her son's room as if she
were unconscious what poor young creature had lately haunted it;
while Ruth hurried into some unoccupied bedroom, and, alone there,
she felt her self-restraint suddenly give way, and burst into the
saddest, most utterly wretched weeping she had ever known. She was
worn out with watching, and exhausted by passionate crying, and she
lay down on the bed and fell asleep. The day passed on; she slumbered
unnoticed and unregarded; she awoke late in the evening with a
sense of having done wrong in sleeping so long; the strain upon
her responsibility had not yet left her. Twilight was closing fast
around; she waited until it had become night, and then she stole down
to Mrs Morgan's parlour.

"If you please, may I come in?" asked she.

Jenny Morgan was doing up the hieroglyphics which she called her
accounts; she answered sharply enough, but it was a permission to
enter, and Ruth was thankful for it.

"Will you tell me how he is? Do you think I may go back to him?"

"No, indeed, that you may not. Nest, who has made his room tidy these
many days, is not fit to go in now. Mrs Bellingham has brought her
own maid, and the family nurse, and Mr Bellingham's man; such a tribe
of servants and no end to packages; water-beds coming by the carrier,
and a doctor from London coming down