e cares to see a window covered with
finger-marks. But she did not say anything; she was in a hurry, and
presently retired to her kitchen, and Esther was left alone.

"I thought last night it would be quite easy to be good here," she said to
herself, "but it doesn't seem so now." She stood and gazed out at the
river disconsolately. It seemed to her that the others, who were not
nearly as anxious to help as she was, were taking all her opportunities,
and she was left, to seem idle and unkind--and really she meant so
differently.

Poor Esther! Once more, while full of big aims, she was overlooking the
little chances.

"Well," she said at last in a very proud tone, "if no one wants me I will
go for a walk by myself. I shan't be in any one's way then!" She knew
quite well she was in no one's way, but she was very aggrieved and full of
self-pity.

She was just crossing the hall to put on her hat, when Miss Charlotte
entered it. Then was her chance, and she knew it; but the old sullen
temper had the upper hand, and forbade her to speak. By this time she had
let herself feel as hurt as though Miss Charlotte had known what was in
her mind and purposely ignored her.

She passed on, put on her hat, and went out. She would not go to the
garden because she did not want to see the others happily at their work;
so, when Miss Charlotte turned in to the kitchen, she slipped out at the
front door and walked away quickly up the road towards the station.
She would not go past the cottages, she wanted to avoid every one;
for that reason she avoided that part of the moor behind the house,
where Penelope would probably be, if she were not in the house or garden.
A little way up the road, on the right-hand side, a bridge crossed the
river. Esther went over it and found herself on the moor beyond, but she
turned away from it lest she should be seen, and clambered down to the
river's edge, where boughs and bushes shut her off from view. It was
lonely there, and she wandered on and on, through sun and shadow, under
low-hanging branches, by tiny beaches of clean river-sand, and all the way
she went the river ran beside her singing a low, cheery song as it rippled
over its uneven bed.

It could not be long before such loveliness must have a soothing effect on
any troubled spirit. By degrees Esther's mood changed, her sense of wrong
grew less, and presently she began to wish she had acted differently.
If she only had, she might n