s house, and each looked at the
other, and neither said or thought:--"How like myself!" Was it possible
that they were really _more_ unlike then?--that the storm which had
passed over both had told more, relatively, on the healthy village dame,
kept blooming by a life whose cares were little more than healthy
excitements, than on the mere derelict of so many storms, any one enough
to send it to the bottom? There was little work left for Time or
Calamity to do on that old face on the pillow; while even this
four-and-twenty-hours of overwrought excitement had left its mark upon
old Phoebe. Gwen saw that the faces _were_ the same, past dispute, as
soon as she compared them point by point.

Once seen, the thing grew, and became strange and unearthly, almost a
discomfort. Gwen went back into the kitchen, where she found Ruth,
affecting some housework but without much heart in it. She too was
showing the effects of the night and day just passed, her heavy eyelids
fighting with their weight, not successfully; her restless hands
protesting against yawns; trying to curb rebellious lips, in vain.

"I can see the likeness now," said Gwen, thinking it best to talk.

"Between mother and--my mother?" was Ruth's reply. How else could she
have said it, without beginning to call old Phoebe her aunt?

Gwen saw the embarrassment, and skipped explanation. "Why not call her
Mrs. Picture--little Dave's name?" Then she felt this was a mistake, and
added:--"No, I suppose that wouldn't do!"

"Something will come, to say, in time. One's head goes, now." Ruth went
on to speak of her childish recollection of the news of her mother's
death--quite a vivid memory--when she was nearly nine years old. "I was
quite a big little maid when the letter came. We got it out, you know,
just now. And, oh, how sick it made me!"

"I should like so much to see it," said Gwen. Her young ladyship's
lightest wish was law, and Ruth nearly went to seek the letter. Gwen had
to be very emphatic that another time would do, to stop her.

"Then I will get it out presently, and give it to your ladyship to take
away and read," said Ruth, and went back to what she was saying. "That
is how I came to be able to call her my mother, at once. I mean the
moment I knew she was not Mrs. Prichard. Now that I know it, I keep
looking at her dear old face to make it out the same face that I kept on
thinking my mother in Australia had, all the time I thought she was
living there awa