Mr. Carruthers was an early man; no danger of any skulking among the numerous hands which found employment on the Poynings estate. If the eye of the master be indeed the spur of the servant, Mr. Carruthers's dependents had quite enough of that stimulant. He made his rounds every morning at an hour which the in-door servants, who were obliged to have breakfast ready on his return, considered heathenish, and the out-door servants declared savoured of slave-driving. Mrs. Brookes knew that she should have no difficulty in procuring a private interview with her mistress on the morning following Mr. Dalrymple's visit, as an hour and a half always elapsed between Mr. Carruthers's leaving the house and his wife's ringing for her maid. The old woman looked worn and weary and very old, as she peered from behind a red-cloth door, which shut off the corridor on which Mr. Carruthers's dressing-room opened from the grand gallery, and watched her master take his creaking way down the staircase, looking as he went more full of self-importance than usual, and treading more heavily, as if the weight of the Home Office communication had got into his boots. When he had disappeared, and she had heard the click of the lock as he opened the great door and went out into the pure fresh morning air, Mrs. Brookes emerged from behind the partition-door, and softly took the way to Mrs. Carruthers's bedroom. The outer door was slightly open, the heavy silken curtain within hung closely over the aperture. The old woman pushed it gently aside, and, noiselessly crossing the room, drew the window curtain, and let in sufficient light to allow her to see that Mrs. Carruthers was still sleeping. Her face, pale, and even in repose bearing a troubled expression, was turned towards the old woman, who seated herself in an arm-chair beside the bed, and looked silently and sadly on the features, whose richest bloom and earliest sign of fading she had so faithfully watched. "How am I to tell her?" she thought. "How am I to make her see what I see, suspect what I suspect? and yet she must know all, for the least imprudence, a moment's forgetfulness, would ruin him. How am I to tell her?" The-silver bell of a little French clock on the chimney-piece rang out the hour melodiously, but its warning struck upon the old woman's ear menacingly. There was much to do, and little time to do it in; she must not hesitate longer. So she laid her withered, blanched old hand upon the polished, ivory-white fingers of the sleeper, lying with the purposelessness of deep sleep upon the coverlet, and addressed her as she had been used to do in her girlhood, and her early desolate widowhood, when her humble friend had been well-nigh her only one. "My dear," she said, "my dear." Mrs. Carruthers's hand twitched in her light grasp; she turned her head away with a troubled sigh, but yet did not wake. The old woman spoke again: "My dear, I have something to say to you."