Experience had already satisfied her on one important point--experience
had shown that she could set the rooted distrust of the other servants
safely at defiance. Time had accustomed the women to her presence in
the house, without shaking the vague conviction which possessed them all
alike, that the newcomer was not one of themselves. All that Magdalen
could do in her own defense was to keep the instinctive female suspicion
of her confined within those purely negative limits which it had
occupied from the first, and this she accomplished.
Day after day the women watched her with the untiring vigilance of
malice and distrust, and day after day not the vestige of a
discovery rewarded them for their pains. Silently, intelligently, and
industriously--with an ever-present remembrance of herself and her
place--the new parlor-maid did her work. Her only intervals of rest and
relaxation were the intervals passed occasionally in the day with old
Mazey and the dogs, and the precious interval of the night during which
she was secure from observation in the solitude of her room. Thanks to
the superfluity of bed-chambers at St. Crux, each one of the servants
had the choice, if she pleased, of sleeping in a room of her own.
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