"I suppose the cooking is vile?"

"I don't know. I never noticed what I ate till I came here, so I can't judge. Perhaps it is not very good. But the dreadful part is that I should mind. I could not have believed it of myself. James and Minna never say anything, but I know it vexes them, as of course it must."

Rachel looked critically at Hester's innocent, childlike face. When Hester was not a cultivated woman of the world she was a child. There was, alas! no medium in her character. Rachel noticed how thin her face and hands had become, and the strained look in the eyes. The faint color in her cheek had a violet tinge.

She did not waste words on the cookery question. She saw plainly enough that Hester's weak health was slipping further down the hill.

"And all this time you have been working?"

"If you call it working. I used to call it so once, but I never do now. Yes, I manage about four hours a day. I have made another pleasant discovery about myself—that I have the temper of a fiend if I am interrupted."

"But surely you told the Gresleys when first you came that you must not be interrupted at certain hours?"

"I did. I did. But, of course—it is very natural—they think that rather self-important and silly. I am thought very silly here, Rachel. And James does not mind being interrupted in writing his sermons. And the Pratts have got the habit of running in in the mornings."

"Who on earth are the Pratts?"

"They are what they call 'county people.' Their father made a fortune in oil, and built a house covered with turrets near here a few years ago. I used to know Captain Pratt, the son, very slightly in London. I never would dance with him. He used to come to our 'At Homes,' but he was never asked to dinner. He is a great 'parti' among a certain set down here. His mother and sisters were very kind to me when I came, but I was not so accustomed then as I am now to be treated familiarly and called 'Hessie,' which no one has ever called me before, and I am afraid I was not so responsive as I see now I ought to have been. Down here it seems your friends are the people whom you live near, not the ones you like. It seems a curious arrangement. And as the Pratts are James's and Minna's greatest friends, I did not wish to offend them. And then, of course, I did offend them mortally at last by losing my temper when they came up to my room to what they called 'rout me out,' though I had told them I was busy in the mornings. I was in a very difficult place, and when they came in I did not know who they were, because only the people in the book were real just then. And then when I recognized them, and the scene in my mind which I had been waiting for for weeks was shattered like a pane of glass, I became quite giddy and spoke wildly. And then—I was so ashamed afterwards—I burst into tears of rage and despair."