“I am not really anxious,” he said again, sitting down at the breakfast-table.  But his face contradicted him.  It was blue and pinched, for he had just returned from reading the morning service to himself in an ice-cold church, but there was a pucker in the brow that was not the result of cold.  The Vicarage porch had fallen down in the night, but he was evidently not thinking of that.  He drank a little coffee, and then got up and walked to the window again.

“She is with the Pratts,” he said, with decision.  “I am glad I sent a note over early, if it will relieve your mind, but I am convinced she is with the Pratts.”

Mrs. Gresley murmured something.  She looked scared.  She made an attempt to eat something, but it was a mere pretence.

The swing door near the back staircase creaked.  In the Vicarage you could hear everything.

Mr. and Mrs. Gresley looked eagerly at the door.  The parlor-maid came in with a note between her finger and thumb.

“She is not there,” said Mr. Gresley, in a shaking voice.  “I wrote Mr. Pratt such a guarded letter, saying Hester had imprudently run across to see them on her return home, and how grateful I was to Mrs. Pratt for not allowing her to return, as it had begun to snow.  He says he and Mrs. Pratt have not seen her.”

“James,” said Mrs. Gresley, “where is she?”

A second step shuffled across the hail, and Fraeulein stood in the door-way.  Her pale face was drawn with anxiety.  In both hands she clutched a trailing skirt plastered with snow, hitched above a pair of large goloshed feet, into which the legs were grafted without ankles.

“She has not return?”

“No,” said Mr. Gresley, “and she is not with the Pratts.”

“I know always she is not wiz ze Pratts,” said Fraeulein, scornfully.  “She never go to Pratt if she is in grief.  I go out at half seven this morning to ze Br-r-rowns, but Miss Br-r-rown know nozing.  I go to Wilderleigh, I see Mrs. Loftus still in bed, but she is not there.  I go to Evannses, I go to Smeeth, I go last to Mistair Valsh, but she is not there.”

Mr. Gresley began to experience something of what Fraeulein had been enduring all night.

“She would certainly not go from my house to a Dissenter’s,” he said, stiffly.  “You might have saved yourself the trouble of calling there, Fraeulein.”

“She like Mr. and Mrs. Valsh.  She gives them her book.”

Fraeulein’s voice drowned the muffled rumbling of a carriage and a ring at the bell, the handle of which, uninjured amid the chaos, kept watch above the remains of the late porch.

The Bishop stood a moment in the little hall, while the maid went into the dining-room to tell the Gresleys of his arrival.  His eyes rested on the pile of letters on the table, on the dead flowers beside them.  They had been so beautiful yesterday when he gave them to Hester.  Hester herself had been so pretty yesterday.