ce looked at it.
She had offended her brother deeply by remonstrating, or, as he called
it, by "interfering in church matters," when he nailed it up. After a
few minutes she dropped over the low church-yard wall into the meadow
below, and flung herself down on the grass in the short shadow of a yew
near at hand. What little air there was to be had came to her across the
Drone, together with the sound of the water lazily nudging the bank and
whispering to the reeds little jokelets which they had heard a hundred
times before.

[Footnote A: A card, headed by the above text, was seen by the writer in
August, 1898, in the porch of a country church.]

Hester's irritable nerves relaxed. She stretched out her small, neatly
shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and
presently could afford to smile.

"Dear James," she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, "I wish we
were not both writers, or, as he calls it, 'dabblers with the pen.' One
dabbler in a vicarage is quite enough."

She took out her letters and read them. Only half of them had been
opened.

"I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings," she said, as she
settled herself comfortably.

Rachel's letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to
the end.

"And so she is leaving London--isn't this rather sudden?--and coming
down at once--to-day--no, yesterday, to Southminster, to the Palace. And
I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the
Bishop will come too. I should be glad if I were not so tired."

Hester looked along the white high road which led to Southminster. In
the hot haze she could just see the two ears of the cathedral pricking
up through the blue. Everything was very silent, so silent that she
could hear the church clock of Slumberleigh, two miles away, strike
twelve. A whole hour before luncheon!

The miller's old white horse, with a dip in his long back and a
corresponding curve in his under outline, was standing motionless in the
sun, fast asleep, his front legs bent like a sailor's.

A little bunch of red and white cows, knee-deep in the water, were
swishing off the flies with the wet tufts of their tails. Hester watched
their every movement. She was no longer afraid of cows. Presently, as if
with one consent, they all made up their minds to relieve the tedium of
the contemplative life by an exhibition of humor, and, scrambling out of
the water, proceeded to canter along the b