ruth, only seven years her senior,
but in all the facts and ways of life, she seemed to be the elder by
at least half a century. Rachel indeed, at the time, felt herself to
be much nearer of an age with her mother. With her mother she could
laugh and talk, ay, and form little wicked whispered schemes behind
the tyrant's back, during some of those Dorcas hours, in which Mrs.
Prime would be employed at Baslehurst; schemes, however, for the
final perpetration of which, the courage of the elder widow would too
frequently be found insufficient.

Rachel Ray was a fair-haired, well-grown, comely girl,--very like
her mother in all but this, that whereas about the mother's eyes
there was always a look of weakness, there was a shadowing of coming
strength of character round those of the daughter. On her brow there
was written a capacity for sustained purpose which was wanting to
Mrs. Ray. Not that the reader is to suppose that she was masterful
like her sister. She had been brought up under Mrs. Prime's
directions, and had not, as yet, learned to rebel. Nor was she in
any way prone to domineer. A little wickedness now and then, to the
extent, perhaps, of a vain walk into Baslehurst on a summer evening,
a little obstinacy in refusing to explain whither she had been and
whom she had seen, a yawn in church, or a word of complaint as to the
length of the second Sunday sermon,--these were her sins; and when
rebuked for them by her sister, she would of late toss her head, and
look slily across to her mother, with an eye that was not penitent.
Then Mrs. Prime would become black and angry, and would foretell hard
things for her sister, denouncing her as fashioning herself wilfully
in the world's ways. On such occasions Mrs. Ray would become very
unhappy, believing first in the one child and then in the other.
She would defend Rachel, till her weak defence would be knocked
to shivers, and her poor vacillating words taken from out of her
mouth. Then, when forced to acknowledge that Rachel was in danger
of backsliding, she would kiss her and cry over her, and beg her to
listen to the sermons. Rachel hitherto had never rebelled. She had
never declared that a walk into Baslehurst was better than a sermon.
She had never said out boldly that she liked the world and its
wickednesses. But an observer of physiognomy, had such observer been
there, might have seen that the days of such rebellion were coming.

She was a fair-haired girl, with hair,