ow nice it would have been to have her here! Ruth
Thrale--yes, Ruth--her own little daughter's name of long ago!

This Ruth _was_ her own daughter. But how to know it!

CHAPTER VII

HOW GWEN CAME BACK, AND FOUND THE "OLD CAT" ASLEEP. AND TOOK OFF
HER SABLES. A CANDLE-LIGHT JOURNEY THROUGH AN ANCIENT HOUSE, AND A
TELEGRAPHIC SUMMONS. HOW GWEN RUSHED AWAY BY A NIGHT-TRAIN, BECAUSE
HER COUSIN CLOTILDA SAID DON'T COME. HOW SHE LEFT A LETTER FOR
WIDOW THRALE AT THE RANGER'S LODGE

Just as the watched pot never boils, so the thing one waits for never
comes, so long as one waits _hard_. The harder one waits the longer it
is postponed. When one sits up to open the door to the latchkeyless,
there is only one sure way of bringing about his return, and that is to
drop asleep _a contre coeur_, and sleep too sound for furious knocks and
rings, gravel thrown at windows, and intemperate language, to arouse
you. Then he will come back, and be obliged to say he has only knocked
once, and you will say you had only just closed your eyes.

Old Maisie was quite sure she had just closed hers, when of a sudden the
voice she longed for filled Heaven and Earth, and said:--"Oh, what a
shame to come and wake you out of such a beautiful sleep! But you
mustn't sleep all night in the arm-chair. Poor dear old Mrs. Picture!
What would Dave say! What would Mrs. Burr say!" And then old Maisie
waked from a dream about unmanageable shrimps, to utter the correct
formula with a conviction of its truth, this time. She _had_ only just
closed her eyes. Only just!

Miss Lutwyche, in attendance, ventured on sympathetic familiarity. Mrs.
Picture would not get any beauty-sleep to-night, that was certain. For
it is well known that only sleep in bed deserves the name, and a clock
was putting its convictions about midnight on record, dogmatically.

Gwen's laugh rang out soon enough to quash its last _ipse dixits_. "Then
the mischief's done, Lutwyche, and another five minutes doesn't matter.
Mrs. Picture's going to tell me all her news. Here--get this thing off!
Then you can go till I ring." The thing, or most of it, was an
unanswerable challenge to the coldest wind of night--the cast-off
raiment of full fifty little sables, that scoured the Russian woods in
times gone by. Surely the breezes had drenched it with the very soul of
the night air in that ride beneath the stars, and the foam of them was
shaken out of it as it release