substitute for religion.  Mark was intensely aware of her holiness, but he was equally aware of her capable well-tended hands and of her chatelaine glittering in and out of a lawn apron.  One tress of her abundant hair was grey, which stood out against the dark background of the rest and gave her a serene purity, an austere strength, but yet like a nun’s coif seemed to make the face beneath more youthful, and like a cavalier’s plume more debonair.  She could not have been over thirty-five when Mark first knew her, perhaps not so much; but he thought of her as ageless in the way a child thinks of its mother, and if any woman should ever be able to be to him something of what his mother had been, Mark thought that Miss Ogilvie might.

Esther Ogilvie the other sister was twenty-five.  She told Mark this when he imitated the villagers by addressing her as Miss Essie and she ordered him to call her Esther.  He might have supposed from this that she intended to confer upon him a measure of friendliness, even of sisterly affection; but on the contrary she either ignored him altogether or gave him the impression that she considered his frequent visits to Meade Cantorum a nuisance.  Mark was sorry that she felt like that toward him, because she seemed unhappy, and in his desire for everybody to be happy he would have liked to proclaim how suddenly and unexpectedly happiness may come.  As a sister of the Vicar of the parish, she went to church regularly, but Mark did not think that she was there except in body.  He once looked across at her open prayer book during the Magnificat, and noticed that she was reading the Tables of Kindred and Affinity.  Now, Mark knew from personal experience that when one is reduced to reading the Tables of Kindred and Affinity it argues a mind untouched by the reality of worship.  In his own case, when he sat beside his uncle and aunt in the dreary Slowbridge church of their choice, it had been nothing more than a sign of his own inward dreariness to read the Tables of Kindred and Affinity or speculate upon the Paschal full moons from the year 2200 to the year 2299 inclusive.  But St. Margaret’s, Meade Cantorum, was a different church from St. Jude’s, Slowbridge, and for Esther Ogilvie to ignore the joyfulness of worshipping there in order to ponder idly the complexities of Golden Numbers and Dominical Letters could not be ascribed to inward dreariness.  Besides, she wasn’t dreary.  Once Mark saw her coming down a woodland glade and almost turned aside to avoid meeting her, because she looked so fay with her wild blue eyes and her windblown hair, the colour of last year’s bracken after rain.  She seemed at once the pursued and the pursuer, and Mark felt that whichever she was he would be in the way.

“Taking a quick walk by myself,” she called out to him as they passed.

No, she was certainly not dreary.  But what was she?