"I think Rachel is right," said the Bishop.

"I don't think she is, at all," said Hester, her plumage ruffled, administering her contradiction right and left to her two best friends like a sharp peck from a wren. "I think we ought to believe the best of people until they prove themselves unworthy, and then—"

"Then what?" said the Bishop, settling himself in his chair.

"Then leave them in silence."

"I only know of a woman's silence by hearsay. I have never met it. Do you mean bitterly reproach the thistle for not bearing grapes?"

"I do not. It is my own fault if I idealize a thistle until the thistle and I both think it is a vine. But if people appear to love and honor certain truths which they know are everything to me, and claim kinship with me on that common ground, and then desert when the pinch comes, as it always does come, and act from worldly motives, then I know that they have never really cared for what they professed to love, that what I imagined to be a principle was only a subject of conversation—and—I withdraw."

"You withdraw!" echoed the Bishop. "This is terrible."

"Just as I should," continued Hester, "if I were in political life. If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord. But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on. And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show him up to himself. I have tried that and it is no use. I should—"

"Denounce him as an apostate?" suggested the Bishop.

"No. He should be to me thenceforward as a heathen."

"Thrice miserable man!"

"You would not have me treat him as a brother after that?"

"Of course not, because he would probably dislike that still more."

At this moment a hurricane seemed to pass through the little house, and the three children rushed into the drawing-room, accompanied by Boulou, in a frantic state of excitement. Boulou, like Hester, had no happy medium in his character. He was what Mrs. Gresley called "very Frenchy," and he now showed his Frenchyness by a foolish exhibition of himself in coursing round and round the room with his silly foreign tail crooked the wrong way.

"Mother got out at Mrs. Brown's," shrieked Regie, in his highest voice, "and I drove up."

"Oh, Regie!" expostulated Mary the virtuous, the invariable corrector of the statements of others. "You held the reins, but William walked beside."

Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they clustered round her to show what they had bought.

Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive. He took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time. The carriage was sent for, and in a few minutes that dignified vehicle was bowling back to Southminster.