When she had been up to Hester’s room, invariably at hours when Hester could not see her, and when she had entered Rachel’s sledge-hammer subscriptions in her various account-books, her attention left her visitors.  She considered them superficial, and wondered how it was that her brother could find time to spend hours talking to both of them, while he had rarely a moment in which to address her chosen band in the drawing-room.  She was one of those persons who find life a very prosaic affair, quite unlike the fiction she occasionally read.

She often remarked that nothing except the commonplace happened.  Certainly she never observed anything else.

So Hester lay in the room above, halting feebly between two opinions, whether to live or to die, and Rachel sat in the Bishop’s study beneath, waiting to make tea for him on his return from the confirmation.

If she did not make it, no one else did.  Instead of ringing for it he went without it.

Rachel watched the sun set—­a red ball dropping down a frosty sky.  It was the last day of the year.  The new year was bringing her everything.

“Good-bye, good-bye,” she said, looking at the last rim of the sun as he sank.  And she remembered other years when she had watched the sun set on the last day of December, when life had been difficult—­how difficult!

“If Hester could only get better I should have nothing left to wish for,” she said, and she prayed the more fervently for her friend, because she knew that even if Hester died, life would still remain beautiful; the future without her would still be flooded with happiness.

“A year ago if Hester had died I should have had nothing left to live for,” she said to herself.  “Now this newcomer, this man whom I have known barely six months, fills my whole life.  Are other women as narrow as I am?  Can they care only for one person at a time like me?  Ah, Hester! forgive me, I can’t help it.”

Hugh was coming in presently.  He had been in that morning, and the Bishop had met him, and had asked him to come in again to tea.  Rachel did not know what the Bishop thought of him, but he had managed to see a good deal of Hugh.

Rachel waited as impatiently as most of us, when our happiness lingers by us, loth to depart.

At last she heard the footman bringing some one across the hall.

Would Hugh’s coming ever become a common thing?  Would she ever be able to greet him without this tumult of emotion, ever be able to take his hand without turning giddy on the sheer verge of bliss?

The servant announced, “Lady Newhaven.”

The two women stood looking at each other.  Rachel saw the marks of suffering on the white face, and her own became as white.  Her eyes fell guiltily before Lady Newhaven’s.

“Forgive me,” she said.

“Forgive you?” said Lady Newhaven, in a hoarse voice.  “It is no use asking me for forgiveness.”