She smiled at him mechanically, but her face relapsed at once into the apathetic expression which sat so ill upon it.  Her lustreless eyes fixed themselves again on the fire.

“And what are you going to do this afternoon?” she said, politely.  It was obvious she did not care what he did.

“I am going to Westhope on business,” he said, looking narrowly at her.  It was all very well for Dr. Brown to say she must be roused; but how were his instructions to be carried out?

“I am a great deal of trouble to you,” said Hester.  “Could not I be sent to a home, or a place where you go through a cure, where I should be out of the way till I’m well?”

“Have I deserved that, Hester?”

“No; but you know I always try to wound my best friends.”

“You don’t succeed, my child, because they know you are in heavy trouble.”

“We will not speak of that,” said Hester, quickly.

“Yes, the time has come to speak of it.  Why do you shut us out of this sorrow?  Don’t you see that you make our burdens heavier by refusing to let us share yours?”

“You can’t share it,” said Hester; “no one can.”

“Do you think I have not grieved over it?”

“I know you have, but it was waste of time.  It’s no good—­no good.  Please don’t cheer me, and tell me I shall write better books yet, and that this trial is for my good.  Dear Bishop, don’t try and comfort me.  I can’t bear it.”

“My poor child, I firmly believe you will write better books than the one which is lost, and I firmly believe that you will one day look back upon this time as a stop in your spiritual life, but I had not intended to say so.  The thought was in my mind, but it was you who put the words into my mouth.”

“I was so afraid that—­”

“That I was going to improve the occasion?”

“Yes.  Dr. Brown and the nurse are so dreadfully cheerful now, and always talking about the future, and how celebrated I shall be some day.  If you and Rachel follow suit I shall—­I think I shall—­go out of my mind.”

The Bishop did not answer.

“Dr. Brown may be right,” Hester went on.  “I may live to seventy, and I may become—­what does he call it?—­a distinguished author.  I don’t know and I don’t care.  But whatever happens in the future, nothing will bring back the book which was burned.”

The Bishop did not speak.  He dared not.

“If I had a child,” Hester continued, in the exhausted voice with which he was becoming familiar, “and it died, I might have ten more, beautiful and clever and affectionate, but they would not replace the one I had lost.  Only if it were a child,” a little tremor broke the dead level of the passionless voice, “I should meet it again in heaven.  There is the resurrection of the body for the children of the body, but there is no resurrection that I ever heard of for the children of the brain.”

Hester held her thin right hand with its disfigured first finger to the fire.