roy,
having completed her morning toilet, and having dismissed her nurse,
rang the bell again five minutes afterward, and on the woman's
re-appearance asked impatiently if the post had come in.

"Post?" echoed the nurse. "Haven't you got your watch? Don't you know
that it's a good half-hour too soon to ask for your letters?" She spoke
with the confident insolence of a servant long accustomed to presume on
her mistress's weakness and her mistress's necessities. Mrs. Milroy, on
her side, appeared to be well used to her nurses manner; she gave her
orders composedly, without noticing it.

"When the postman does come," she said, "see him yourself. I am
expecting a letter which I ought to have had two days since. I don't
understand it. I'm beginning to suspect the servants."

The nurse smiled contemptuously. "Whom will you suspect next?" she
asked. "There! don't put yourself out. I'll answer the gate-bell this
morning; and we'll see if I can't bring you a letter when the postman
comes." Saying those words, with the tone and manner of a woman who is
quieting a fractious child, the nurse, without waiting to be dismissed,
left the room.

Mrs. Milroy turned slowly and wearily on her bed, when she was left by
herself again, and let the light from the window fall on her face. It
was the face of a woman who had once been handsome, and who was still,
so far as years went, in the prime of her life. Long-continued suffering
of body and long-continued irritation of mind had worn her away--in the
roughly expressive popular phrase--to skin and bone. The utter wreck of
her beauty was made a wreck horrible to behold, by her desperate efforts
to conceal the sight of it from her own eyes, from the eyes of her
husband and her child, from the eyes even of the doctor who attended
her, and whose business it was to penetrate to the truth. Her head, from
which the greater part of the hair had fallen off; would have been less
shocking to see than the hideously youthful wig by which she tried to
hide the loss. No deterioration of her complexion, no wrinkling of her
skin, could have been so dreadful to look at as the rouge that lay
thick on her cheeks, and the white enamel plastered on her forehead. The
delicate lace, and the bright trimming on her dressing-gown, the ribbons
in her cap, and the rings on her bony fingers, all intended to draw the
eye away from the change that had passed over her, directed the eye to
it, on the contrary; emphasized