, where I should be out
of the way till I'm well?"

"Have I deserved that, Hester?"

"No; but you know I always try to wound my best friends."

"You don't succeed, my child, because they know you are in heavy
trouble."

"We will not speak of that," said Hester, quickly.

"Yes, the time has come to speak of it. Why do you shut us out of this
sorrow? Don't you see that you make our burdens heavier by refusing to
let us share yours?"

"You can't share it," said Hester; "no one can."

"Do you think I have not grieved over it?"

"I know you have, but it was waste of time. It's no good--no good.
Please don't cheer me, and tell me I shall write better books yet, and
that this trial is for my good. Dear Bishop, don't try and comfort me. I
can't bear it."

"My poor child, I firmly believe you will write better books than the
one which is lost, and I firmly believe that you will one day look back
upon this time as a stop in your spiritual life, but I had not intended
to say so. The thought was in my mind, but it was you who put the words
into my mouth."

"I was so afraid that--"

"That I was going to improve the occasion?"

"Yes. Dr. Brown and the nurse are so dreadfully cheerful now, and always
talking about the future, and how celebrated I shall be some day. If you
and Rachel follow suit I shall--I think I shall--go out of my mind."

The Bishop did not answer.

"Dr. Brown may be right," Hester went on. "I may live to seventy, and I
may become--what does he call it?--a distinguished author. I don't know
and I don't care. But whatever happens in the future, nothing will bring
back the book which was burned."

The Bishop did not speak. He dared not.

"If I had a child," Hester continued, in the exhausted voice with which
he was becoming familiar, "and it died, I might have ten more, beautiful
and clever and affectionate, but they would not replace the one I had
lost. Only if it were a child," a little tremor broke the dead level of
the passionless voice, "I should meet it again in heaven. There is the
resurrection of the body for the children of the body, but there is no
resurrection that I ever heard of for the children of the brain."

Hester held her thin right hand with its disfigured first finger to the
fire.

"A great writer who had married and had children, whom she worshipped,
once told me that the pang of motherhood is that even your children
don't seem your very own. They are often more like some o