eatre, 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 tear-stained 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, whi