The whole affair seemed to be more the quarrel of vulgar, spoiled children of nine or ten than an encounter between a couple of grown women in the springtide of their youth, and Ruth silently glanced from one to the other with a troubled, half-pitying expression of countenance; but she did not speak until the noise had begun to lull. "Please don't say that I broke the glass," she said at last. "I shall. Hold your tongue, miss. She broke it through her wretched carelessness, didn't she, 'Rie?" "Give me back the French book, and I'll tell you," was the reply. "Take your nasty old French book," said Clotilde, throwing it back. "I've read it all, and it's horribly naughty. Now, then, didn't she break the glass?" "Yes," said Marie, arranging her shabby morning dress, and standing before the fragments of the toilet-glass, a handsome, lady-like girl, whose beauty no shabbiness of costume could conceal. "There," said Clotilde, "do you hear, Cindy? You broke the glass, and if you say you didn't I'll make your wretched little life miserable." "Very well, dear, I'll say I did," said Ruth calmly. "Hist, 'Rie! The book!" whispered Clotilde, her sharp ears having detected a coming step. Marie made a pantherine bound across the room, and thrust the book between the mattress and palliasse just as the handle rattled, and a tall, gaunt elderly woman entered the room. She was not pleasant to look upon, for there was too much suggestion of a draped scaffold erected for the building of a female human figure about her hard square bony form, while her hard face, which seemed to wrinkle only about the forehead, as if it had never smiled since childhood, was not made more pleasant by the depth and darkness of the lines in her brow all being suggestive of the soap and flannel never probing their depths, which was not the case, however, for she was scrupulously clean, even to her blonde cap, and its side whiskers with a sad-coloured flower in each. "Morning, children," she said harshly. "Your aunts 'll be down directly. You ought to be dressed by now." "Morning, nurse," said the girls in chorus. "Ruth's so slow," said Clotilde. "Then do your hair yourself," said the woman roughly. "Ruth, child, turn down that bed, and open the window." Their actions before her arrival had been those of children; she treated them like children, and they were as obedient and demure now as little girls, while the woman placed a large white jug containing a tablespoon upon the table, and a plain tumbler beside it. Ruth began to open the bed, and Marie cast anxious eyes at the part where her French novel lay _perdu_. "'Tisn't physic morning again, nurse," said Clotilde pettishly. "Yes it is, miss, so don't you grumble. You know it's Wednesday as well as I do."