"I must. You did not care then. If a flagrant case came before you you gave something like other uncharitable people who hate feeling uncomfortable. But you care now. You seek out those who need you. Answer me. Were they cheaply bought or not, that compassion and love for the degraded and the suffering which were the outcome of your years of poverty in Museum Buildings?"

"They were cheaply bought," said Rachel, with conviction, speaking with difficulty.

"Would you have learned them if you had gone on living in Portman Square?"

"Oh, Hester! would anybody?"

"Yes, they would. But that is not the question. Would you?"

"N—no," said Rachel.

There was a long silence.

Rachel's mind took its staff and travelled slowly, humbly, a few more difficult steps up that steep path where "Experience is converted into thought as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin."

At last she turned her grave eyes upon her friend.

"I see what you mean," she said; "I have not reached the place yet; but I can believe that I shall come to it some day, when I shall feel as thankful for that trouble as I do feel now for having known poverty. Yes, Hester, you are right. I was a hard woman, without imagination. I have been taught in the only way I could learn—by experience. I have been very fortunate."

Hester did not answer, but bent down and kissed Rachel's hands. It was as if she had said, "Forgive me for finding fault with one so far above me." And the action was so understood.

Rachel colored, and they sat for a moment hand close in hand, heart very near to heart.

"How is it you are so sure of these things, Hester?" said Rachel, in a whisper. "When you say them I see they are true, and I believe them, but how do you know them?"

A shadow, a very slight one, fell across Hester's face. "'Love knows the secret of grief.' But can Love claim that knowledge if he is asked how he came by it by one who should have known?" The question crept in between the friends and moved them apart. Hester's voice altered.

"Minna would say that I picked them up from the conversation of James. You know the Pratts are perfectly aware of what I have, of course, tried to conceal, namely, that the love-scenes in the Idyll were put together from scraps I had collected of James's engagement to Minna. And all the humorous bits are claimed by a colony of cousins in Devonshire who say that any one 'who had heard them talk' could have written the Idyll. And any one who had not heard them apparently. The so-called profane passages are all that are left to me as my own."

"You are profane now," said Rachel, smiling, but secretly wounded by the flippancy which she had brought upon herself.

A distant whoop distracted their attention, and they saw Regie galloping towards them, imitating a charger, while Fräulein and the two little girls followed.