her list of Bible-classes, and servants' choral unions, and the
long roll of contributors to the guild of work which she herself had
started.

When she had been up to Hester's room, invariably at hours when Hester
could not see her, and when she had entered Rachel's sledge-hammer
subscriptions in her various account-books, her attention left her
visitors. She considered them superficial, and wondered how it was that
her brother could find time to spend hours talking to both of them,
while he had rarely a moment in which to address her chosen band in the
drawing-room. She was one of those persons who find life a very prosaic
affair, quite unlike the fiction she occasionally read.

She often remarked that nothing except the commonplace happened.
Certainly she never observed anything else.

So Hester lay in the room above, halting feebly between two opinions,
whether to live or to die, and Rachel sat in the Bishop's study beneath,
waiting to make tea for him on his return from the confirmation.

If she did not make it, no one else did. Instead of ringing for it he
went without it.

Rachel watched the sun set--a red ball dropping down a frosty sky. It
was the last day of the year. The new year was bringing her everything.

"Good-bye, good-bye," she said, looking at the last rim of the sun as he
sank. And she remembered other years when she had watched the sun set on
the last day of December, when life had been difficult--how difficult!

"If Hester could only get better I should have nothing left to wish
for," she said, and she prayed the more fervently for her friend,
because she knew that even if Hester died, life would still remain
beautiful; the future without her would still be flooded with happiness.

"A year ago if Hester had died I should have had nothing left to live
for," she said to herself. "Now this newcomer, this man whom I have
known barely six months, fills my whole life. Are other women as narrow
as I am? Can they care only for one person at a time like me? Ah,
Hester! forgive me, I can't help it."

Hugh was coming in presently. He had been in that morning, and the
Bishop had met him, and had asked him to come in again to tea. Rachel
did not know what the Bishop thought of him, but he had managed to see a
good deal of Hugh.

Rachel waited as impatiently as most of us, when our happiness lingers
by us, loth to depart.

At last she heard the footman bringing some one across the hall.

Would Hugh