Hester sat motionless. The star paled and paled before the coming of a greater than he. Across the pause which God has set 'twixt night and day came the first word of the robin. It reached Hester's ear as from another world—a world that had been left behind. The fragmentary notes floated up to her from an immeasurable distance, like scattered bubbles through deep water.

The day was coming. God's creatures of tree and field and hill took form. Man's creature, the little stout church in their midst, thrust once more its plebeian outline against God's sky. Dim shapes moved athwart the vacancy of the meadows. Voices called through the gray. Close against the eaves a secret was twittered, was passed from beak to beak. In the nursery below a little twitter of waking children broke the stillness of the house.

But Hester did not hear it. She had fallen into a deep sleep in the low window-seat, with her pale forehead against the pane; a sleep so deep that even the alarum of the baby did not rouse her, nor the entrance of Emma with the hot water.

*

"James," said Mrs. Gresley, an hour later; as she and her husband returned through the white mist from early celebration, "Hester was not there. I thought she had promised to come."

"She had."

There was a moment's silence.

"Perhaps she is not well," said Mr. Gresley, closing the church-yard gate into the garden.

Mrs. Gresley's heart swelled with a sense of injustice. She had often been unwell, often in feeble health before the birth of her children, but had she ever pleaded ill-health as an excuse for absenting herself from one of the many services which her husband held to be the main-spring of the religious life?

"I do not think she can be very unwell. She is standing by the magnolia now," she said, her lip quivering, and withdrawing her hand from her husband's arm. She almost hated the slight, graceful figure, which was not of her world, which was, as she thought, coming between her and her husband.

"I will speak seriously to her," said Mr. Gresley, dejectedly, who recollected that he had "spoken seriously" to Hester many times at his wife's instigation without visible result. And as he went alone to meet his sister he prayed earnestly that he might be given the right word to say to her.

A ray of sunlight, faint as an echo, stole through the lingering mist, parting it on either hand, and fell on Hester.

Hester, standing in a white gown under the veiled trees in a glade of silver and trembling opal, which surely mortal foot had never trod, seemed infinitely removed from him. Dimly he felt that she was at one with this mysterious morning world, and that he, the owner, was an alien and a trespasser in his own garden.

But a glimpse of his cucumber-frames in the background reassured him. He advanced with a firmer step, as one among allies.