Mistress Wayne shrank backward from her touch. "I did but try to wake him, Nell. He would be angered if he missed my bridal-morn." Nell made no answer, but turned her back on the little woman; and Mistress Wayne crept, softly as she had come, out of the chamber whose guest perplexed her so. "Her bridal-morn!" cried Nell, as though her father could hear that she was speaking to him. "Is it for malice that she gowns herself in white on such a day, and prates of weddings? Father, why didst go to the Low Country for a wife? She has brought disaster on disaster since the first day she set foot in Marsh." A new thought came to her, adding its own load to the burden that was already over-heavy for her. Would Ned win free of his passion for Janet Ratcliffe, or would his marriage, too, be ill-fated as his father’s? To wed from the Low Country was folly, but marriage between a Ratcliffe and a Wayne would be a crime on which the country-side would up and cry out shame. And then, in a moment, all the girl’s fierceness, her resolution and tearless pride, were lost. God had made her a woman, and like a woman she fell prone across the bier, and wept, and thought neither of vengeance nor of hatred, but of the love that had grown through twenty years of comradeship between the dead man and herself. It was not her father’s strength, his sweeping recklessness in fight, that she remembered now; but she recalled his gentleness toward her, his clean and upright courtesy, his generosity to rich and poor among his neighbours. Marsh House was full of the unrest that goes before a burial, the fruitless wandering to-and-fro which seems to ease the sorrow of the living. The menservants were idling in the courtyard with a subdued sort of noisiness; the maids were still passing and re-passing from the kitchen; and Nanny Witherlee, unable to snatch more than the briefest spell of sleep, came hobbling by and by into the hall. The old woman stopped on seeing Nell stretched across the bier, and half advanced toward her; then shook her head. "I’ll let her be; happen ’twill be best for her to cry her een out," she muttered, and turned down the passage to the kitchen. Nanny showed different altogether this morning from the quivering, ghost-ridden watcher who had kept so long a vigil with only the dead and strange voices in the wind for company. Then there had been no work to be done, no household cares to rouse the old instincts in her; but now that preparations for the burial feast were going busily forward she slipped naturally into the place which had been hers at Marsh aforetime. Brisk as though she had had a full night’s sleep, she fell to doing this and that, rating the maids the while with a keenness that robbed the day of half its sadness for her.