e 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.

"Will you please get into bed as fast as you can," she said, "and when
you knock on the floor I will come and take away your clothes and get
them dried. Please to wrap this new blanket round you, lest the cold
sheets shoul