riffith, as usual, and
wondering whether he would always prefer yellow hair to black. This
actually put her off her guard for once, and she gave the rival hair a
little contemptuous tug: and the reader knows what followed.

Staggered by her mistress's question, Caroline made no reply, but only
panted a little, and proceeded more carefully.

But O the struggle it cost her not to slap both Mrs. Gaunt's fair cheeks
impartially with the backs of the brushes! And what with this struggle,
and the reprimand, and the past agitations, by and by the comb ceased,
and the silence was broken by faint sobs.

Mrs. Gaunt turned calmly round and looked full at her hysterical
handmaid.

"What is to do?" said she. "Is it because I chid you, child? Nay, you
need not take that to heart; it is just my way: I can bear anything but
my hair pulled." With this she rose and poured some drops of
sal-volatile into water, and put it to her secret rival's lips: it was
kindly done, but with that sort of half contemptuous and thoroughly cold
pity women are apt to show to women, and especially when one of them is
Mistress and the other is Servant.

Still it cooled the extreme hatred Caroline had nursed, and gave her a
little twinge, and awakened her intelligence. Now her intelligence was
truly remarkable when not blinded by passion. She was a woman with one
or two other masculine traits besides her roving heart. For instance,
she could sit and think hard and practically for hours together: and on
these occasions her thoughts were never dreamy and vague; it was no
brown study, but good hard thinking. She would knit her coal-black
brows, like Lord Thurlow himself, and realize the situation, and weigh
the pros and cons with a steady judicial power rarely found in her sex;
and, _nota bene_, when once her mind had gone through this process, then
she would act with almost monstrous resolution.

She now shut herself up in her own room for some hours, and weighed the
matter carefully.

The conclusion she arrived at was this: that, if she stayed at Hernshaw
Castle, there would be mischief; and probably she herself would be the
principal sufferer to the end of the chapter, as she was now.

She said to herself: "I shall go mad, or else expose myself, and be
turned away with loss of character; and then what will become of me, and
my child? Better lose life or reason than character. I know what I have
to go through; I have left a man ere now with my heart t