"Dear James," she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, "I wish we were not both writers, or, as he calls it, 'dabblers with the pen.' One dabbler in a vicarage is quite enough."

She took out her letters and read them. Only half of them had been opened.

"I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings," she said, as she settled herself comfortably.

Rachel's letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to the end.

"And so she is leaving London—isn't this rather sudden?—and coming down at once—to-day—no, yesterday, to Southminster, to the Palace. And I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the Bishop will come too. I should be glad if I were not so tired."

Hester looked along the white high road which led to Southminster. In the hot haze she could just see the two ears of the cathedral pricking up through the blue. Everything was very silent, so silent that she could hear the church clock of Slumberleigh, two miles away, strike twelve. A whole hour before luncheon!

The miller's old white horse, with a dip in his long back and a corresponding curve in his under outline, was standing motionless in the sun, fast asleep, his front legs bent like a sailor's.

A little bunch of red and white cows, knee-deep in the water, were swishing off the flies with the wet tufts of their tails. Hester watched their every movement. She was no longer afraid of cows. Presently, as if with one consent, they all made up their minds to relieve the tedium of the contemplative life by an exhibition of humor, and, scrambling out of the water, proceeded to canter along the bank with stiff raised tails, with an artificial noose sustained with difficulty just above the tuft.

"How like James and the Pratts!" Hester said to herself, watching the grotesque gambols and nudgings of the dwindling humorists. "It must be very fatiguing to be so comic."

Hester had been up since five o'clock, utilizing the quiet hours before the house was astir. She was tired out. A bumblebee was droning sleepily near at hand. The stream talked and talked and talked about what he was going to do when he was a river. "How tired the banks must be of listening to him!" thought Hester, with closed eyes.

And the world melted slowly away in a delicious sense of well-being, from which the next moment, as it seemed to her, she was suddenly awakened by Mr. Gresley's voice near at hand.

"Hester! Hester! HESTER!"

"Here! here!" gasped Hester, with a start, upsetting her lapful of letters as she scrambled hastily to her feet.

The young vicar drew near, and looked over the church-yard wall. A large crumb upon his upper lip did not lessen the awful severity of his countenance.

"We have nearly finished luncheon," he observed. "The servants could not find you anywhere. I don't want to be always finding fault, Hester, but I wish, for your own sake as well as ours, you would be more punctual at meals."