After a time she began to reason, to wonder that this one man, to whom the giving of her childish admiration had seemed an unpardonable liberty, could have thought of her at all, except as he might give a moment's attention to the birds and butterflies that helped to make the old place pleasant. How could he—so handsome, so much above all other gentlemen of his own class—think of her while Lady Rose was near in all the splendor of her beauty and the grace of a high position!
"Was it that she was also beautiful?"
When this question arose in her mind, Ruth turned upon her pillow, and, half ashamed of the movement, looked into a small mirror that hung on the opposite wall. What she saw there brought a smile to her mouth and the flash of diamonds to the blackness of her eyes.
"Not like the Lady Rose," she thought, "not fair and white like her; but he loves me! He loves me!"
CHAPTER VII.
JUDITH.
RUTH JESSUP was indeed more deeply pledged to Richard Storms than she was herself aware of. The old farmer and Jessup had been fast friends for years when these young people were born, and almost from the first it had become an understanding between them that their families should be united in these children. The two fathers had saved money in their hard-working and frugal lives, which was to lift the young people into a better social class than the parents had any wish to occupy, and each had managed to give to his child a degree of education befitting the advancement looked forward to in their future.
Young Richard had accepted this arrangement with alacrity when he was old enough to comprehend its advantages, for, of all the maidens in that neighborhood, Ruth Jessup was the most beautiful; and what was equally important to him, even in his boyhood, the most richly endowed. As for the girl herself, the importance of this arrangement had never been a subject of serious consideration.
Bright, gay, and happy in her nest-like home, she accepted this lad as a special playmate in her childhood, and had no repugnance to his society after that, so long as more serious things lay in the distance. Brought up with those habits of strict obedience so commendable in the children of English parents, she accepted without question the future that had seemed most desirable to her father, who loved her, as she well knew, better than anything on earth.