nd stole into Rachel's.

"Everybody will think," said Rachel, "when they see the engagement in
to-morrow's papers that I give him everything because he is poor and his
place involved, and of course I am horribly wealthy. But in reality it
is I who am poor and he who is rich. He has given me a thousand times
more than I could ever give him, because he has given me back the power
of loving. It almost frightens me that I can care so much a second time.
I should not have thought it possible. But I seem to have got the hang
of it now, as Mr. Dick would say. I wish you were down-stairs, Hester,
as you will be in a day or two. You would be amused by the way he shocks
Miss Keane. She asked if he had written anything on his travels, and he
said he was on the point of bringing out a little book on 'Cannibal
Cookery,' for the use of Colonials. He said some of the recipes were
very simple. He began: 'You take a hand and close it round a yam.' But
the Bishop stopped him."

The moment Rachel had said, "He is on the point of bringing out a book,"
her heart stood still. How could she have said such a thing? But
apparently Hester took no notice.

"He must have been experimenting on my poor hand," she said. "I'm sure I
never burned it like this myself."

"It will soon be better now."

"Oh! I don't mind about it now that it doesn't hurt all the time."

"And your head does not ache to-day, does it?"

"Nothing to matter. But I feel as if I had fallen on it from the top of
the cathedral. Dr. Brown says that is nonsense, but I think so all the
same. When you believe a thing, and you're told it's nonsense, and you
still believe it, that is an hallucination, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"I have had a great many," said Hester, slowly. "I suppose I have been
more ill than I knew. I thought I saw, I really did see, the spirits of
the frost and the snow looking in at the window. And I talked to them a
long time, and asked them what quarrel they had with me, their sister,
that since I was a child they had always been going about to kill me.
Aunt Susan always seemed to think they were enemies who gave me
bronchitis. And I told them how I loved them and all their works. And
they breathed on the pane and wrote beautiful things in frost-work, and
I read them all. Now, Rachel, is that an hallucination about the
frost-work, because it seems to me still, now that I am better, though I
can't explain it, that I do see the meaning of it at last, and that I