at first intended.

"I suppose men don't know," she said to herself sullenly, in thinking of
Osborn, who spent his days out of doors. "At any rate, they don't care."

Emily cared greatly, and was so full of interest and sympathy that there
was something like physical relief in talking to her.

"You two have become great pals," Alec said, on an afternoon when he
stood at a window watching Lady Walderhurst's carriage drive away. "You
spend hours together talking. What is it all about?"

"She talks a good deal about her husband. It is a comfort to her to find
someone to listen. She thinks he is a god. But we principally talk
about--me."

"Don't discourage her," laughed Osborn. "Perhaps she will get so fond of
you that she will not be willing to part with us, as she will be obliged
to take both to keep one."

"I wish she would, I wish she would!" sighed Hester, tossing up her
hands in a languid, yet fretted gesture.

The contrast between herself and this woman was very often too great to
be equably borne. Even her kindness could not palliate it. The simple
perfection of her country clothes, the shining skins of her horses, the
smooth roll of her carriage, the automatic servants who attended her,
were suggestive of that ease and completeness in all things, only to be
compassed by long-possessed wealth. To see every day the evidences of it
while one lived on charitable sufferance on the crumbs which fell from
the master's table was a galling enough thing, after all. It would
always have been galling. But it mattered so much more now--so much more
to Hester than she had known it could matter even in those days when as
a girl she had thirstily longed for it. In those days she had not lived
near enough to it all to know the full meaning and value of it--the
beauty and luxury, the stateliness and good taste. To have known it in
this way, to have been almost part of it and then to leave it, to go
back to a hugger-mugger existence in a wretched bungalow hounded by
debt, pinched and bound hard and fast by poverty, which offered no
future prospect of bettering itself into decent good luck! Who could
bear it?

Both were thinking the same thing as their eyes met.

"How are we to stand it, after this?" she cried out sharply.

"We can't stand it," he answered. "Confound it all, something _must_
happen."

"Nothing will," she said; "nothing but that we shall go back worse off
than before."

* * * *