Abel had his back towards Hester, and only the corduroy half of him was visible as he stooped over his work.  Occasionally he could be induced to straighten himself, and—­holding himself strongly at the hinge with earth-ingrained hands—­to discourse on polities and religion, and to opine that our policy in China was “neither my eye nor my elber.”  “The little lady,” as he called Hester, had a knack of drawing out Abel; but to-day, as he did not see her, she slipped past him, and, crossing the church-yard, sat down for a moment in the porch to regain her breath, under the card of printed texts offered for the consideration of his flock by their young pastor.

“How dreadful is this place!  This is none other but the house of God,” was the culling from the Scriptures which headed the selection.[A] Hester knew that card well, though she never by any chance looked at it.  She had offended her brother deeply by remonstrating, or, as he called it, by “interfering in church matters,” when he nailed it up.  After a few minutes she dropped over the low church-yard wall into the meadow below, and flung herself down on the grass in the short shadow of a yew near at hand.  What little air there was to be had came to her across the Drone, together with the sound of the water lazily nudging the bank and whispering to the reeds little jokelets which they had heard a hundred times before.

[Footnote A:  A card, headed by the above text, was seen by the writer in August, 1898, in the porch of a country church.]

Hester’s irritable nerves relaxed.  She stretched out her small, neatly shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and presently could afford to smile.

“Dear James,” she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, “I wish we were not both writers, or, as he calls it, ‘dabblers with the pen.’  One dabbler in a vicarage is quite enough.”

She took out her letters and read them.  Only half of them had been opened.

“I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings,” she said, as she settled herself comfortably.

Rachel’s letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to the end.

“And so she is leaving London—­isn’t this rather sudden?—­and coming down at once—­to-day—­no, yesterday, to Southminster, to the Palace.  And I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the Bishop will come too.  I should be glad if I were not so tired.”

Hester looked along the white high road which led to Southminster.  In the hot haze she could just see the two ears of the cathedral pricking up through the blue.  Everything was very silent, so silent that she could hear the church clock of Slumberleigh, two miles away, strike twelve.  A whole hour before luncheon!

The miller’s old white horse, with a dip in his long back and a corresponding curve in his under outline, was standing motionless in the sun, fast asleep, his front legs bent like a sailor’s.