Now I fancy this screen will look quite out of the common, Ruth; and when it is done, I shall get some of those Japanese cranes and stand them on the top.

Their claws are made to twist round, you know, and I shall put some monkeys--you know those droll chenille monkeys, Ruth--creeping up the sides to meet the cranes.

I don't honestly think, my dear"-- with complacency--"that many people will have anything like it." Ruth did not hesitate to say that she felt certain very few would.
Mrs.Alwynn was delighted at the interest she took in her new work.

Ruth was coming out at last, she told her husband; and she passed many happy hours entirely absorbed in the arrangement of the cards upon the panels.
Ruth, thankful that her attention had been providentially distracted from the matter that filled her own thoughts, in a way that surprised and annoyed her, sorted, and snipped, and pasted, and decided weighty questions as to whether a goitred robin on a twig should be placed next to a smiling plum-pudding, dancing a polka with a turkey, or whether a congealed cross, with "Christian greeting" in icicles on it, should separate the two.
To her uncle Ruth told what had happened; and as he slowly wended his way to Vandon on the day fixed for the tenant's dinner, Mr.Alwynn mused thereon, and I believe, if the truth were known, he was sorry that Dare had been refused.

He was a little before his time, and he stopped on the bridge, and looked at the river, as it came churning and sweeping below, fretted out of its usual calm by the mill above.