Ryder called it "yellow stuff" down in the kitchen; that was one comfort: but a feeble one; the sun came in at the lady's window, and Ryder's shapely hand was overflowed, and her eyes offended, by waves of burnished gold: and one day Griffith came in and kissed it in her very hand. His lips felt nothing but his wife's glorious hair; but, by that exquisite sensibility which the heart can convey in a moment to the very fingernails, Caroline's hand, beneath, felt the soft touch through her mistress's hair; and the enamoured hypocrite thrilled, and then sickened at her own folly. For in her good sense could be overpowered, but never long blinded. On the day in question she was thinking of Griffith, as usual, and wondering whether he would always prefer yellow hair to black. This actually put her off her guard for once, and she gave the rival hair a little contemptuous tug: and the reader knows what followed. Staggered by her mistress's question, Caroline made no reply, but only panted a little, and proceeded more carefully. But, oh the struggle it cost her not to slap both Mrs. Gaunt's fair cheeks with the backs of the brushes! And what with this struggle, and the reprimand, and the past agitations, by-and-by the comb ceased, and the silence was broken by faint sobs. Mrs. Gaunt turned calmly round and looked full at her hysterical handmaid. "What is to do?" said she. "Is it because I chid you, child? Nay, you need not take that to heart; it is just my way: I can bear anything but my hair pulled." With this she rose and poured some drops of sal-volatile into water, and put it to her secret rival's lips: it was kindly done, but with that sort of half contemptuous and thoroughly cold pity women are apt to show to women, and especially when one of them is Mistress and the other is Servant. Still it cooled the extreme hatred Caroline had nursed, and gave her a little twinge, and awakened her intelligence. Now her intelligence was truly remarkable when not blinded by passion. She was a woman with one or two other masculine traits beside her roving heart. For instance, she could sit and think hard and practically for hours together: and on these occasions her thoughts were never dreamy and vague; it was no brown study, but good hard thinking. She would knit her coal-black brows, like Lord Thurlow himself, and realize the situation, and weigh the pros and cons with a steady judicial power rarely found in her sex: and, nota bene, when once her mind had gone through this process, then she would act with almost monstrous resolution. She now shut herself up in her own room for some hours and weighed the matter carefully. The conclusion she arrived at was this: that, if she stayed at Hernshaw Castle, there would be mischief; and probably she herself would be the principal sufferer to the end of the chapter, as she was now.