s identity, before
either really understood the cruel machination that had cancelled the
life of either for the other.

Ruth Thrale left them alone together, and went back to force herself to
eat. Keziah wanted to get back to her old man, and how could she go,
unless Ruth kept in trim to attend to her two charges? Who could say
that old Phoebe, at eighty, would not give in under the strain? Ruth had
always a happy faculty of self-forgetfulness; and now, badly as she had
felt the shock, she so completely lost sight of herself in the thought
of the greater trouble of the principal actors, as to be fully alive to
the one great need ahead, that of guarding and preserving what was left
of the old life, the tending of which had come so strangely upon her.
She refused Keziah's offer to remain on. Elizabeth-next-door, she said,
was always at hand for emergencies.

Keziah stayed late enough to see all arranged for the night, ending with
a more or less successful effort to get old Maisie to swallow arrowroot.
She helped Ruth to establish the Granny in her own high-backed chair
beside her sister--for neither would relinquish the other's hand--and
took advantage of a very late return of Brantock, the carrier, to convey
her home, where she arrived after midnight.

All know the feeling that surely must have been that of at least one of
the old sisters, that sleep ought to be for some mysterious reason
combated, or nonsuited rather, when the mind is at odds with grave
events. One rises rebellious against its power, when it steals a march
on wakefulness, catching the keenest vigilance unawares. There was no
reason why Granny Marrable should not sleep in her own arm-chair--which
she would say was every bit as good as bed, and used accordingly--except
that yielding meant surrender of the faculties to unconsciousness of a
problem not yet understood, with the sickening prospect of finding it
unanswered on awakening. That seemed to be reason enough for many
resentful recoils from the very portals of sleep; serving no end, as
Maisie had been overcome without a contest, and lay still as an effigy
on a tomb. A vague fear that she might die unwatched, looking so like
Death already, may have touched Phoebe's mind. But fears and unsolved
riddles alike melted away and vanished in the end; and when Ruth Thrale,
an hour later, starting restless from her own couch near by, looked in
to satisfy herself that all was well, both might have been leagues