had not read Rachel's letter announcing his coming till
she had taken refuge in the field where she had fallen asleep, and her
mental equilibrium had been so shaken by the annoyance she felt she had
caused the Gresleys at luncheon that she had entirely forgotten the
subject till this moment.

She darted out of the house and flew down the little drive. But Fortune
frowned on Hester to-day. She reached the turn of the road only to see
the bent figure of Mr. Gresley whisk swiftly out of sight, his clerical
coat-tails flowing gracefully out behind like a divided skirt on each
side of the back wheel.

Hester toiled back to the house breathless and dusty, and ready to cry
with vexation. "They will never believe I forgot to tell them," she said
to herself. "Everything I do is wrong in their eyes and stupid in my
own." And she sat down on the lowest step of the stairs and leaned her
head against the banisters.

To her presently came a ministering angel in the shape of Fraeulein, who
had begged an egg from the cook, had boiled it over her spirit-lamp, and
now presented it with effusion to her friend on a little tray, with two
thin slices of bread-and-butter.

"You are all goodness, Fraeulein," said Hester, raising her small,
haggard face out of her hands. "It is wrong of me to give so much
trouble." She did not want the egg, but she knew its oval was the only
shape in which Fraeulein could express her silent sympathy. So she
accepted it gratefully, and ate it on the stairs, with the tenderly
severe Fraeulein watching every mouthful.

Life did not seem quite such a hopeless affair when the little meal was
finished. There were breaks in the clouds, after all. Rachel was coming
to see her that afternoon. Hester was, as Fraeulein often said, "easy
cast down and easy cast up." The mild stimulant of the egg "cast her up"
once more. She kissed Fraeulein and ran up to her room, where she
divested her small person of every speck of dust contracted on the
road, smoothed out an invisible crease in her holland gown, put back the
little ring of hair behind her ear which had become loosened in her rush
after her brother, and then came down, smiling and composed, to await
her friend in the drawing-room.

Hester seldom sat in the drawing-room, partly because it was her
sister-in-law's only sitting-room and partly because it was the regular
haunt of the Pratt girls, who (with what seemed to Hester dreadful
familiarity) looked in at the wi