han justice in her fine raiment: her country breeding and simple
beauty would have appeared to greater advantage in the white merino
she had desired to wear. She had been forced into a dress that
accentuated her deficiencies. At that hour she thought she could never
see Mrs. Frostham again.

To these tempestuous, humiliating, heart-breaking reflections the
storm outside made an angry accompaniment. The wind howled down the
chimney and wailed around the house, and the rain beat against the
window and pattered on the flagged walks. The darkness came on early,
and the cold grew every hour more searching. She was not insensible to
these physical discomforts, but they seemed so small a part of her
misery that she made no resistance to their attack. Will and Brune,
sitting almost speechless downstairs, were both thinking of her. When
it was quite dark they grew unhappy. First one and then the other
crept softly to her room door. All was as still as death. No movement,
no sound of any kind, betrayed in what way the poor soul within
suffered. No thread of light came from beneath the door: she was in
the dark, and she had eaten nothing all day.

About six o'clock Will could bear it no longer. He knocked softly at
her door, and said: "My little lass, speak to Will! Have a cup of tea!
Do have a cup of tea, dearie!"

The voice was so unlike Will's voice that it startled Aspatria. It
told her of a suffering almost equalling her own. She rose from the
chair in which she had been sitting for hours, and went to him. The
room was dark, the passage was dark; he saw nothing but the denser
dark of her figure, and her white face above it. She saw nothing but
his great bulk and his shining eyes. But she felt the love flowing
out from his heart to her, she felt his sorrow and his sympathy, and
it comforted her. She said: "Will, do not fret about me. I am
over-getting the shame and sorrow. Yes, I will have a cup of tea, and
tell Tabitha to make a fire here. Dear Will, I have been a great
care and shame to you."

"Ay, you have, Aspatria; but I would rather die than miss you, my
little lass."

This interview gave a new bent to Aspatria's thoughts. As she drank
the tea, and warmed her chilled feet before the blaze, she took into
consideration what misery her love for Ulfar Fenwick had brought to
her brothers' once happy home, the anxiety, the annoyance, the shame,
the ill-will and quarrelling, the humiliations that Will and Brune had
been