o him, a thin veil of smoke drifted
across the little lawn.

Regie came dancing and caracoling round the corner.

"Father!" he cried, rushing to the window, "Abel has made such a bonfire
in the back-yard, and he is burning weeds and all kinds of things, and
he has given us each a ''tato' to bake, and Fraeulein has given us a
band-box she did not want, and we've filled it quite full of dry leaves.
And do you think if we wait a little Auntie Hester will be back in time
to see it burn?"

It was a splendid bonfire. It leaped. It rose and fell. It was
replenished. Something alive in the heart of it died hard. The children
danced round it.

"Oh, if only Auntie Hester was here!" said Regie, clapping his hands as
the flame soared.

But "Auntie Hester" was too late to see it.

CHAPTER XLI

And we are punished for our purest deeds,
And chasten'd for our holiest thoughts; alas!
There is no reason found in all the creeds,
Why these things are, nor whence they come to pass.
--OWEN MEREDITH

It was while Hester was at the Palace that Lord Newhaven died. She had
perhaps hardly realized, till he was gone, how much his loyal friendship
had been to her. Yet she had hardly seen him for the last year, partly
because she was absorbed in her book, and partly because, to her
astonishment, she found that her brother and his wife looked coldly upon
"an unmarried woman receiving calls from a married man."

For in the country individuality has not yet emerged. People are married
or they are unmarried--that is all. Just as in London they are agreeable
or dull--that is all.

"Since I have been at Warpington," Hester said to Lord Newhaven one day,
the last time he found her in, "I have realized that I am unmarried. I
never thought of it all the years I lived in London, but when I visit
among the country people here, as I drive through the park, I remember,
with a qualm, that I am a spinster, no doubt because I can't help it. As
I enter the hall I recall, with a pang, that I am eight-and-twenty. By
the time I am in the drawing-room I am an old maid."

She had always imagined she would take up her friendship with him again,
and when he died she reproached herself for having temporarily laid it
aside. Perhaps no one, except Lord Newhaven's brothers, felt his death
more than Dick and Hester and the Bishop. The Bishop had sincerely
liked Lord Newhaven. A certain degree of