CHAPTER IV.

While her anxious mistresses were thus talking her over the servant
lay on her humble bed and slept. They knew she did, for they heard
her heavy breathing through the thin partition wall. Whether, as
Hilary suggested, she was too ignorant to notice the days of the
week, or month, or, as Selina thought, too stupid to care for any
thing beyond eating, drinking, and sleeping. Elizabeth manifested no
anxiety about herself or her destiny.

She went about her work just as usual; a little quicker and readier,
now she was becoming familiarized to it; but she said nothing. She
was undoubtedly a girl of silent and undemonstrative nature.

"Sometimes still waters run deep," said Miss Hilary.

"Nevertheless. there are such things as canals," replied Johanna.
"When do you mean to have your little talk with her?"

Hilary did not know. She was sitting, rather more tired than usual,
by the school-room fire, the little people having just departed for
their Saturday half-holiday. Before clearing off the debris which
they always left behind, she stood a minute at the window, refreshing
her eyes with the green field opposite, and the far-away wood,
crowned by a dim white monument, visible in fair weather, on which
those bright brown eyes had a trick of lingering, even in the middle
of school hours. For the wood and the hill beyond belonged to a
nobleman's "show" estate, five miles off--the only bit of real
landscape beauty that Hilary had ever beheld. There, during the last
holidays but one, she, her sisters, her nephew, and, by his own