you.
What should you take her to be?" The subject was just worth spare
attention not wanted for the lace-spools.

"Why, now--there's Parson Dunage's mother at the Rectory. She's
ninety-four this Christmas. This old soul she might be half-way on,
between me and Parson Dunage's mother at the Rectory."

Mrs. Ruth dropped the spools, to think arithmetically, with her fingers.
"Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight," she said, "Eighty-seven!...
This one's nearer your own age than that, mother." She went on with her
work.

"There now, Ruth, is not that just like you, all over? You will always
be making me out older than I am. I am not turned of eighty-one, child,
not till next year. My birthday comes the first day of the year."

"I thought you and my mother were both born at Christmas."

"Well, my dear, we always called it Christmas, for to have a birthday
together on New Year's Eve. But the church-clock got time to strike the
hour betwixt and between the two of us, so Maisie was my elder sister by
just that, and no more. She would say ... Ah dearie me!--poor Maisie!...
she would say by rights _she_ should marry first, being the elder. And
then I would tell her the clock was fast, and we were both of an age.
'Twas a many years sooner she married, as God would have it. All of
three years before ever I met poor Nicholas." And then the old woman,
who had hitherto kept back the story of her sister's marriage, made a
slip of the tongue. "Maybe I was wrong, but I was a bit scared of men
and marriage in those days."

It was no wonder Ruth connected this with the father she had never seen.
"Why _did_ my father go to Australia?" said she. It was asked entirely
as a matter of history, for did it not happen before the speaker was
born? The passive acceptance through a lifetime of such a fact can only
be understood by persons who have experienced a similar sealed
antecedent. Non-inquiry into such a one may be infused into a mother's
milk.

Granny Marrable could be insensible to pressure after a life-time of
silence. She had never thrown light on the mystery and she would not,
now. Her answer even suggested a false solution. "He grew to be rich
after your mother died. But I lost touch of him then, and when and where
he came by his death is more than I can tell ye, child!" There was
implication in this of a prosperous colonist, completely impatriated in
the land of his wealth.

Ruth's father's vanished history was of less impor