And so with her wheel and her tapestry-frame for her father's company, and her graver accomplishments for the solitude of the Lady's Bower, Ruth contrived to live as happily as any princess. Solitude is, however, no term to connect with the spot where the birds sang their sweet music the livelong day amid the beechen branches which swept the panes of the old painted oriel window, and the wind sighed gently in the long summer evenings through the ivy trails and creepers which Ruth trained about its carved stone-cornices, or in his rougher moods snarled and blustered, like the tyrant he can be, round the ancient house. But in Ruth's eyes the broad look-out from that window always wore a beauty, and with all her fifteen years' experience she had not been able to determine whether that expanse of lowly undulating meadow-land and winding waters looked loveliest in its spring and summer garb of green, tented over with cloudless blue, or in autumn's grays and russets, or clad in its pure white winter snow robe; nor even whether golden sunlight, or the moon's silvery sheen, as to-night she stood gazing on it, pleased her best. [Sidenote: Rumbold's chamber.] Master Rumbold himself slept on the ground-storey, in a room immediately beneath his stored malt-sacks. This chamber, tradition said, contained in its stone flooring a trap-door opening upon a ladder which conducted into the fearsome dungeons underground, where prisoners used to be thrust, bidding hope and the blessed air and daylight farewell for ever. The subject was, however, one rarely touched upon in the maltster's presence by those who best knew his humours; for he would either smile in bitter contempt, or--and indeed that more generally happened--frown angrily; and, let his mood be the one or the other, always turned the conversation at last with some half-uttered remark that so might it, or might it not be, and that he had simply occupied the room ever since he had been master of the place, because it commanded a watch on both wings of the house. The quaintly timbered walls of the new wing contained the malting-house; while its gabled roof stretching up stiff as cat's ears, afforded sleeping accommodation for the domestic servants and the few workpeople living on the premises. [Sidenote: The malting house.]