"The poor lady," she heard the man-goblin say, "has had some difference with her husband; but whether she wants to hide from him or from the whole world or from both, she only can tell. Our business is to take care of her, and do for her what God may lay to our hand. What she desires to hide, is sacred to us. We have no secrets of our own, Ruth, and have the more room for those of other people who are unhappy enough to have any. Let God reveal what He pleases: there are many who have no right to know what they most desire to know. She needs nursing, poor thing! We will pray to God for her."
"But how shall we make her comfortable in such a poor little house?" returned Ruth. "It is the dearest place in the world to me—but how will she feel in it?"
"We will keep her warm and clean," answered her uncle, "and that is all an angel would require."
"An angel!—yes," answered Ruth: "for angels don't eat; or, at least, if they do, for I doubt if you will grant that they don't, I am certain that they are not so hard to please as some people down here. The poor, dear lady is delicate—you know she has always been—and I am not much of a cook."
"You are a very good cook, my dear. Perhaps you do not know a great many dishes, but you are a dainty cook of those you do know. Few people can have more need than we to be careful what they eat,—we have got such a pair of troublesome cranky little bodies; and if you can suit them, I feel sure you will be able to suit any invalid that is not fastidious by nature rather than necessity."
"I will do my best," said Ruth cheerily, comforted by her uncle's confidence. "The worst is that, for her own sake, I must not get a girl to help me."
"The lady will help you with her own room," said Polwarth. "I have a shrewd notion that it is only the fine ladies, those that are so little of ladies that they make so much of being ladies, who mind doing things with their own hands. Now you must go and make her some tea, while she gets in bed. She is sure to like tea best."
Juliet retreated noiselessly, and when the woman-gnome entered the kitchen, there sat the disconsolate lady where she had left her, still like the outcast princess of a fairy-tale: she had walked in at the door, and they had immediately begun to arrange for her stay, and the strangest thing to Juliet was that she hardly felt it strange. It was only as if she had come a day sooner than she was expected—which indeed was very much the case, for Polwarth had been looking forward to the possibility, and latterly to the likelihood of her becoming their guest.
"Your room is ready now," said Ruth, approaching her timidly, and looking up at her with her woman's childlike face on the body of a child. "Will you come?"
Juliet rose and followed her to the garret-room with the dormer window, in which Ruth slept.