But Alexander Minchin was a late sitter, as his young wife knew to her cost, and to-night he had told her where he meant to sleep, but she had not heard him come up.

The room would have been the back drawing-room in the majority of such houses, and Rachel peeped in on her way down.

It was empty; moreover, the bed was not made, nor the curtains drawn.

Rachel repaired the first omission, then hesitated, finally creeping upstairs again for clean sheets.

And as she made his bed, not out of any lingering love for him, but from a sense of duty and some consideration for his comfort, there was yet something touching in her instinctive care, that breathed the wife she could have been.
He did not hear her, though the stairs creaked the smallness of the hour--or if he heard he made no sign.