ea. That she had an equally strong will was
obvious. But there the likeness ended. Hester's figure was slight, and
she stooped a little. Hester's eyes were very gentle, very appealing
under their long, curled lashes. They were sad, too, as Mr. Gresley's
never were, gay as his never were. An infinite patience looked out of
them sometimes, that patience of enthusiasm which will cast away its
very soul and all its best years for the sake of an ideal. Hester
showed her age in her eyes. She was seven-and-twenty, and appeared many
years younger until she looked at you.

Mrs. Gresley looked with veiled irritation at her sister-in-law in her
clean holland gown, held in at the waist with a broad lilac ribbon,
adroitly drawn in picturesque folds through a little silver buckle.

Mrs. Gresley, who had a waist which the Southminster dress-maker
informed her had "to be kept down," made a mental note for the hundredth
time that Hester "laced in."

Hester gave that impression of "finish" and sharpness of edge so rarely
found among the blurred, vague outlines of English women. There was
nothing vague about her. Lord Newhaven said she had been cut out body
and mind with a sharp pair of scissors. Her irregular profile, her
delicate, pointed speech and fingers, her manner of picking up her
slender feet as she walked, her quick, alert movements--everything about
her was neat, adjusted, perfect in its way, yet without more apparent
effort than the _succes fou_ in black and white of the water wagtail,
which she so closely resembled.

"Good-morning," she said, turning back with them to the house. "Abel
says it is going to be the hottest day we have had yet. And the
letter-bag is so fat that I could hardly refrain from opening it.
Really, James, you ought to hide the key, or I shall succumb to
temptation."

Once in the days of her ignorance, when she first came to live at
Warpington, Hester had actually turned the key in the lock of the sacred
letter-bag when the Gresleys were both late, and had extracted her own
letters. She never did it a second time. On the contrary, she begged
pardon in real regret at having given such deep offence to her brother
and his wife, and in astonishment that so simple an action could offend.
She had made an equally distressing blunder in the early days of her
life with the Gresleys by taking up the daily paper on its arrival in
the afternoon.

"My dear Hester," Mrs. Gresley said, really scandalized, "I am s