done, decline acting altogether, but speedily summoned the
creditors, examined into the accounts, sold up the farming-stock,
and discharged all the debts; paid about L 80 into the Skelton
bank for a week, while he inquired for a situation or
apprenticeship of some kind for poor heart-broken Ruth; heard of
Mrs. Mason's; arranged all with her in two short conversations;
drove over for Ruth in his gig; waited while she and the old
servant packed up her clothes; and grew very impatient while she
ran, with her eyes streaming with tears, round the garden,
tearing off in a passion of love whole boughs of favourite China
and damask roses, late flowering against the casement-window of
what had been her mother's room. When she took her seat in the
gig, she was little able, even if she had been inclined, to
profit by her guardian's lectures on economy and self-reliance;
but she was quiet and silent, looking forward with longing to the
night-time, when, in her bedroom, she might give way to all her
passionate sorrow at being wrenched from the home where she had
lived with her parents, in that utter absence of any anticipation
of change, which is either the blessing or the curse of
childhood. But at night there were four other girls in her room,
and she could not cry before them. She watched and waited till,
one by one, they dropped off to sleep, and then she buried her
face in the pillow, and shook with sobbing grief; and then she
paused to conjure up, with fond luxuriance, every recollection of
the happy days, so little valued in their uneventful peace while
they lasted, so passionately regretted when once gone for ever;
to remember every look and word of the dear mother, and to moan
afresh over the change caused by her death--the first clouding in
of Ruth's day of life. It was Jenny's sympathy on this first
night, when awakened by Ruth's irrepressible agony, that had made