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Updated: June 19, 2025
She entered Ruth's room with it furtively. Despite her injunction against hurry, the girl had already indued the white brocade and stood before the mirror conning herself. She wore no jewels; she owned none. "Shut your eyes, dear," commanded Miss Quiney, and, stealing up behind her, slipped and clasped the necklace about her throat, then fell back, admiring the reflection in the glass.
"Well, well!" he said: "Young Quiney is a so-so choice, since women must necessarily condescend to intermarrying with men. But he is far from worthy of her. Tell me, now, was there ever a rarer piece of beauty?" "The wench is not ill-favored," was the dark lady's unenthusiastic answer. "So! but who is she?" He replied: "She is my daughter.
Very likely they had been at once splendid and vague. Miss Quiney was not worldly-wise, yet her wisdom did not transcend what little she knew of the world. She had great notions of Family, for example. She had imagined, may be still in a vague way that Sir Oliver would some day provide his protegee with a mate of good, or at least sufficient, Colonial birth.
Its duties were not arduous, and allowed him to cross the Atlantic half a dozen times with Lady Vyell and revisit Eagles, where Miss Quiney held faithful stewardship. He never completely recovered his health. The pressure under which he had lain during those three terrible hours had left him with some slight curvature of the spine.
"Oh, not in the least like your dear papa," Miss Quiney made haste to assure him; "but a quite low class of person, and, I should say, connected rather with the Excise. You must remember that all this happened in the East, a long time ago." The child bent his head over the book. His eyes were hidden from her, and she never guessed what hope she had dashed.
Or it may be that he was afraid. . . . Once, indeed, like Sindbad in the cave, he had seen a glimmering chance of escape. It came when, reading in his Scripture lesson that Christ consorted by choice with publicans and sinners, he had been stopped by Miss Quiney with the information that "publican" meant "a kind of tax-collector." "Like papa?" asked the child, and held his breath for the answer.
Miss Quiney clasps her hands. Shall she, within her breast, thank God? She cannot. She hears the voice saying, A very shapely child. . . . But the labour was difficult. There was some pressure on the brain, some lesion. They would have denied Ruth sight of the poor little body, but she stretched out her arms for it and insisted.
So he took his leave, and Ruth abode with the Corderys and Miss Quiney. Disloyal though she felt it, she caught herself wishing, more than once, that her lord could have taken dear Tatty back with him to Boston. I desire to depict Ruth Josselin here as the woman she was, not as an angel.
Miss Quiney and Ruth Josselin, seated that evening in the drawing-room at Sabines, were startled at eight o'clock or thereabouts by a knocking on the front door. Miss Quiney looked up from her tambour-work, with hand and needle suspended in mid-air, and gazed across at Ruth, who, seated at the harpsichord, had been singing softly murmuring rather the notes of Ben Jonson's Charis her Triumph
On reaching home, some hours ahead of the girl, he had summoned Miss Quiney to his library and told her the whole story. The interview on her part had been exclamatory and tearful; but the good lady, with all her absurdities, was a Christian. She was a woman too, and delighted to serve an overmastering will.
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