For eighteen months he, the master of this demesne, had not set foot within its front gate; not once since the day when on a sudden resolution he had installed Ruth Josselin here, under ward of Miss Quiney, to be visited and instructed in theology, the arts, and the sciences, by such teachers as that unparagoned spinster might, with his approval, select. In practice he left it entirely to her, and Miss Quiney's taste in teachers was of the austerest. What nutriment (one might well have asked) could a young mind extract from the husks of doctrine and of grammar purveyed to Ruth by the Reverend Malachi Hichens, her tutor in the Holy Scriptures and in the languages of Greece and Rome? The answer is that youth, when youth craves for it, will draw knowledge even from the empty air and drink it through the very pores of the skin. Mr. Hichens might be dry--inhumanly dry--and his methods repellent; but there were the books, after all, and the books held food for her hunger, wine for her thirst. So too the harpsichord held music, though Miss Quiney's touch upon it was formal and lifeless. . . . In these eighteen months Ruth Josselin had been learning eagerly, teaching herself in a hundred ways and by devices of which she wist not. Yet always she was conscious of the final purpose of this preparation; nay, it possessed her, mastered her. For whatever fate her lord designed her, she would be worthy of it. He never came. For eighteen months she had not seen him. Was it carelessly or in delicacy that he withheld his face? Or peradventure in displeasure? Her heart would stand still at times, and her face pale with the fear of it. She could not bethink her of having displeased him; but it might well be that he repented of his vast condescension. Almost without notice, and without any reason given, he had deported her to this house on the hill. . . . Yet, if he repented, why did he continue to wrap her around with kindness? Why had she these good clothes, and food and drink, servants to wait on her, tutors to teach her--everything, in short, but liberty and young companions and his presence that most of all she desired and dreaded?