ard
stolidity and calm. Still, Maggie was not an altogether purposeless and
thoughtless maiden; thoughts occasionally drifted her way; ideas, when
once born in her heart, were slow to die. When affection took root there
it became a very sturdy plant. If there was any one in the world whom
Maggie adored, it was her dear young mistress, Miss Polly Maybright.
Often at night Maggie awoke, and thought, with feelings of almost
worship, of this bright, impulsive young lady. How delightful that week
had been when she and Polly had cooked, and housekeeped, and made cakes
and puddings together! Would any one but Polly have forgiven her for
taking that pound to save her mother's furniture? Would any one in all
the world, except that dear, warm-hearted, impulsive Polly, have
promised to do without a winter jacket in order to return that money to
the housekeeping fund? Maggie felt that, stupid as she knew herself to
be, slow as she undoubtedly was, she could really do great things for
Polly. In Polly's cause her brain could awake, the inertia which more or
less characterized her could depart. For Polly she could undoubtedly
become a brave and active young person.

She was delighted with herself when she assisted Miss Maybright to
descend from her bedroom window, and to escape with her on to the moor,
but her delight and sense of triumph had not been proof against the
solitude of the sad moor, against the hunger which was only to be
satisfied with berries and spring water, and, above all, against the
terrible apparition of the wife of Micah Jones. What Maggie went,
through in the hermit's hut, what terrors she experienced, were only
known to Maggie's own heart. When, however, Mrs. Ricketts got back her
daughter from that terrible evening's experience, she emphatically
declared that "Mag were worse nor useless; that she seemed daft-like,
and a'most silly, and that never, never to her dying day, would she
allow Mag to set foot on them awful lonely commons again."

Mrs. Ricketts, however, was not a particularly obstinate character, and
when Polly's bright face peeped round her door, and Polly eagerly, and
almost curtly, demanded that Maggie should that very moment accompany
her on a delightful picnic to Troublous Times Castle, and Maggie
herself, with sparkling eyes and burning cheeks, was all agog to go, and
was now inclined to pooh-pooh the terrors she had endured in the
hermit's hut, there was nothing for Mrs. Ricketts to do but to