Dinah must have risen a little before the sun the next morning, for she was downstairs about five o’clock.  So was Seth, for, through Lisbeth’s obstinate refusal to have any woman-helper in the house, he had learned to make himself, as Adam said, “very handy in the housework,” that he might save his mother from too great weariness; on which ground I hope you will not think him unmanly, any more than you can have thought the gallant Colonel Bath unmanly when he made the gruel for his invalid sister.  Adam, who had sat up late at his writing, was still asleep, and was not likely, Seth said, to be down till breakfast-time.  Often as Dinah had visited Lisbeth during the last eighteen months, she had never slept in the cottage since that night after Thias’s death, when, you remember, Lisbeth praised her deft movements and even gave a modified approval to her porridge.  But in that long interval Dinah had made great advances in household cleverness, and this morning, since Seth was there to help, she was bent on bringing everything to a pitch of cleanliness and order that would have satisfied her Aunt Poyser.  The cottage was far from that standard at present, for Lisbeth’s rheumatism had forced her to give up her old habits of dilettante scouring and polishing.  When the kitchen was to her mind, Dinah went into the new room, where Adam had been writing the night before, to see what sweeping and dusting were needed there.  She opened the window and let in the fresh morning air, and the smell of the sweet-brier, and the bright low-slanting rays of the early sun, which made a glory about her pale face and pale auburn hair as she held the long brush, and swept, singing to herself in a very low tone—­like a sweet summer murmur that you have to listen for very closely—­one of Charles Wesley’s hymns: 

     Eternal Beam of Light Divine,
     Fountain of unexhausted love,
     In whom the Father’s glories shine,
     Through earth beneath and heaven above;

     Jesus! the weary wanderer’s rest,
     Give me thy easy yoke to bear;
     With steadfast patience arm my breast,
     With spotless love and holy fear.

     Speak to my warring passions, “Peace!”
     Say to my trembling heart, “Be still!”
     Thy power my strength and fortress is,
     For all things serve thy sovereign will.

She laid by the brush and took up the duster; and if you had ever lived in Mrs. Poyser’s household, you would know how the duster behaved in Dinah’s hand—­how it went into every small corner, and on every ledge in and out of sight—­how it went again and again round every bar of the chairs, and every leg, and under and over everything that lay on the table, till it came to Adam’s papers and rulers and the open desk near them.  Dinah dusted up to the very edge of these and then hesitated, looking at them with a longing but timid eye.  It was painful to see how much dust there was among them.  As she was looking in this way, she heard Seth’s step just outside the open door, towards which her back was turned, and said, raising her clear treble, “Seth, is your brother wrathful when his papers are stirred?”