When she had done, she lifted up Ruth's face by placing her hand under the round white chin.

She gazed into the countenance, expecting to read some anger there, though it had not come out in words; but she only met the large, quiet eyes, that looked at her with sad gentleness out of their finely-hollowed orbits.

Ruth's soft, yet dignified submission, touched Sally with compunction, though she did not choose to show the change in her feelings.

She tried to hide it, indeed, by stooping to pick up the long bright tresses; and, holding them up admiringly, and letting them drop down and float on the air (like the pendant branches of the weeping birch), she said: "I thought we should ha' had some crying--I did.

They're pretty curls enough; you've not been so bad to let them be cut off neither.