Presently the dark shadow of the watchman's figure moved. He sounded his rattle and walked on, calling in his ringing monotone:
"It is just two o'clock, and a fine frosty morning. All well."
As the sound died away with the watchman's heavy footsteps, Caroline Herschel closed the shutter, and saying, "I am wide awake now," reseated herself at the table, and wrote steadily on till the clock from the Abbey church had struck four, when at last she went to bed.
Her naturally strong physique, her unemotional nature, and her calm and quiet temper, except when pestered by her domestics' misdemeanours, were in Caroline Herschel's favour. Her head had scarcely touched the pillow before she was in a sound refreshing sleep, while many of the votaries of fashion tossed on their uneasy beds till day-dawn.
Griselda Mainwaring was up very much earlier than Lady Betty on all occasions, but on the morning after the ball in Wiltshire's Rooms she was dressed and in the sitting-room before her ladyship had made any sign of lifting her heavy head from the pillow. Heavy, indeed, as she had been too cross and too tired to allow Graves to touch the erection of powder and puff, which had cost Mr. Perkyns so many sighs.
Griselda had taken down her own hair without help, and had shaken the powder out of its heavy masses--no easy task, and requiring great patience.
"I will forswear powder henceforth," she said, as she looked at herself in the glass. "Lady Betty says truly, powder must go with paint. I will have neither."
So the long, abundant tresses were left to their own sweet will, their lustre dimmed by the remains of the powder at the top, but the under tresses were falling in all their rippling beauty over her shoulders.
Amelia Graves brought her a cup of chocolate and some finger-biscuits, saying:
"Her ladyship has already had two breakfasts, and after the last has gone off to sleep again."
"I hope she will remember she promised to go to Mr. Herschel's musical reunion," Griselda said. "If not, Graves, I must go alone; I must indeed. You will send the boy Zack for a chair, won't you?"
"More of the gay world! Ah, my dear, I do pity you."
"Gay world! Well, I know nothing that lifts one above it as music does. I am no longer the pleasure-seeker then?"