He spoke well, the earnest, blind, would-be leader endeavoring to guide her to the ditch from which he knew not how she had emerged, passionately distressed at the opposition he met with as he would have drawn her lovingly towards it.

The tears were in Hester's eyes, but the eyes themselves were as flint seen through water. She stifled many fierce and cruel impulses to speak as plainly as he did, to tell him that it was not religion that was abhorent to her, but the form in which he presented it to her, and that the sin against the Holy Ghost was disbelief, like his, in the religion of others. But when have such words availed anything? When have they been believed? Hester had a sharp tongue, and she was slowly learning to beware of it as her worst enemy. She laid down many weapons before she trusted herself to speak.

"It is good of you to care what becomes of me," she said, gently, but her voice was cold. "I am sorry you regard me as you do. But from your point of view you were right to speak—as—as you have done. I value the affection that prompted it."

"She can't meet me fairly," said Mr. Gresley to himself, with sudden anger at the meanness of such tactics. "They say she is so clever, and she can't refute a word I say. She appears to yield and then defies me. She always puts me off like that."

The sun had vanquished the mist, and in the brilliant light the two figures moved silently, side by side, back to the house, one with something very like rage in his heart, the rage that in bygone days found expression in stake and fagot.

Perhaps the heaviest trouble which Hester was ever called upon to bear had its mysterious beginnings on that morning of opal and gossamer when the magnolia opened.

Chapter XXIV

*

Il le fit avec des arguments inconsistants et irréfutables, de ces arguments qui fondent devant la raison comme la neige an feu, et qu'on ne peut saisir, des arguments absurdes et triomphants, de curé de campagne qul démontre Dieu.—Guy DE MAUPASSANT.

Sybell's party broke up on Saturday, with the exception of Rachel and Mr. Tristram, who had been unable to finish by that date a sketch he was making of Sybell. When Doll discovered that his wife had asked that gentleman to stay over Sunday he entreated Hugh, in moving terms, to do the same.

"I am not literary," said Doll, who always thought it necessary to explain that he was not what no one thought he was. "I hate all that sort of thing. Utter rot, I call it. For goodness' sake, Scarlett, sit tight. I must be decent to the beast in my own house, and if you go I shall have to have him alone jawing at me till all hours of the night in the smoking-room."

Hugh was easily persuaded, and so it came about that the morning congregation at Warpington had the advantage of furtively watching Hugh and Mr. Tristram as they sat together in the carved Wilderleigh pew, with Sybell and Rachel at one end of it, and Doll at the other. No one looked at Rachel. Her hat attracted a momentary attention, but her face none.