lls of lace and smoothing out tucks.

"Doesn't it make you happy to look at them?" she said.

"_You_ look at them," said Hester, staring at her, "as if the sight of
them made you hungry, or as if you had bought them for yourself."

Emily turned slightly away. She said nothing. For a few moments there
was a dead silence.

Hester spoke again. What in the world was it in the mere look of the
tall, straight body of the woman to make her feel hot and angered.

"If you had bought them for yourself," she persisted, "they would be
worn by a Marquis of Walderhurst."

Emily laid down the robe she had been holding. She put it on the bed,
and turned round to look at Hester Osborn with serious eyes.

"They _may_ be worn by a Marquis of Walderhurst, you know," she
answered. "They may."

She was remotely hurt and startled, because she felt in the young woman
something she had felt once or twice before, something resentful in her
thoughts of herself, as if for the moment she represented to her an
enemy.

The next moment, however, Hester Osborn fell upon her with embraces.

"You are an angel to me," she cried. "You are an angel, and I can't
thank you. I don't know how."

Emily Walderhurst patted her shoulder as she kindly enfolded her in warm
arms.

"Don't thank me," she half whispered emotionally. "Don't. Just let us
_enjoy_ ourselves."

Chapter Thirteen

Alec Osborn rode a good deal in these days. He also walked a good deal,
sometimes with a gun over his shoulder and followed by a keeper,
sometimes alone. There was scarcely a square yard of the Palstrey Manor
lands he had not tramped over. He had learned the whole estate by heart,
its woods, its farms, its moorlands. A morbid secret interest in its
beauties and resources possessed him. He could not resist the temptation
to ask apparently casual questions of keepers and farmers when he found
himself with them. He managed to give his inquiries as much the air of
accident as possible, but he himself knew that they were made as a
result of a certain fevered curiosity. He found that he had fallen into
the habit of continually making plans connected with the place. He said
to himself, "If it were mine I would do this, or that. If I owned it, I
would make this change or that one. I would discharge this keeper or put
another man on such a farm." He tramped among the heather thinking these
things over, and realising to the full what the pleasure of such powers
would m