rt was beating too urgently, and the
blood in her ears had tightened them. No one was in the left-hand room,
no one was in the right; only there was a sign of occupancy: a
peach-coloured silk bag hung on the back of a chair and the lacy corner
of a handkerchief stood up in its ruffly throat. The bag, the
handkerchief, brought her courage back. They looked like a substantial
Esther of useless graces she had to fight. And so passionately alive was
she to everything concerning Jeffrey that it seemed base of a woman once
belonging to him to parade lacy trifles in ruffly bags when he was
condemned to coarse, hard usages. But having Esther to fight, she
stepped into that room, and immediately a warm, yet, she had time to
think, rather a discontented voice called from the room behind it:

"Is that you, Sophy?"

Lydia answered in an intemperate haste, and like many another rebel to
the English tongue, she found a proper pronoun would not serve her for
sufficient emphasis.

"No," she said, "it's me."

And she followed on the heels of her words, with a determined soft pace,
to the room of the voice, and came upon a brown-eyed, brown-haired,
rather plump creature in a white dress, who was lying in a long chair
and eating candied fruit from a silver dish. This, Lydia knew, was
Esther Blake. She had expected to feel for her the distaste of
righteousness in the face of the wrong-doer: for Esther, she knew, was
proven, by long-continued hardness of heart and behaviour, indubitably
wrong. Here was Esther, Jeff's wife, not showing more than two-thirds of
her thirty-three years, her brow unlined, her expression of a general
sweetness indicating not only that she wished to please but that she
had, in the main, been pleased. The beauty of her face was in its long
eyelashes, absurdly long, as if nature had said, "Here's a by-product we
don't know what to do with. Put it into lashes." Her hands were white
and exquisitely cared for, and she wore no wedding ring. Lydia noted
that, with an involuntary glance, but strangely it did not move her to
any access of indignation. Anger she did feel, but it was, childishly,
anger over the candied fruit. "How can you lie there and eat," she
wanted to cry, "when Jeff is where he is?"

A little flicker ran over Esther's face: it might at first have been the
ripple of an alarmed surprise, but she immediately got herself in hand.
She put her exquisite feet over the side of the chair, got up and, in
one