“You are all goodness, Fraeulein,” said Hester, raising her small, haggard face out of her hands.  “It is wrong of me to give so much trouble.”  She did not want the egg, but she knew its oval was the only shape in which Fraeulein could express her silent sympathy.  So she accepted it gratefully, and ate it on the stairs, with the tenderly severe Fraeulein watching every mouthful.

Life did not seem quite such a hopeless affair when the little meal was finished.  There were breaks in the clouds, after all.  Rachel was coming to see her that afternoon.  Hester was, as Fraeulein often said, “easy cast down and easy cast up.”  The mild stimulant of the egg “cast her up” once more.  She kissed Fraeulein and ran up to her room, where she divested her small person of every speck of dust contracted on the road, smoothed out an invisible crease in her holland gown, put back the little ring of hair behind her ear which had become loosened in her rush after her brother, and then came down, smiling and composed, to await her friend in the drawing-room.

Hester seldom sat in the drawing-room, partly because it was her sister-in-law’s only sitting-room and partly because it was the regular haunt of the Pratt girls, who (with what seemed to Hester dreadful familiarity) looked in at the windows when they came to call, and, if they saw any one inside, entered straightway by the same, making retreat impossible.

The Miss Pratts had been willing, when Hester first came into the neighborhood, to take a good-natured though precarious interest in “their Vicar’s sister.”  Indeed, Mrs. Gresley had felt obliged to warn Hester not to count too much on their attentions, “as they sometimes dropped people as quickly as they took them up.”

Hester was ignorant of country life, of its small society, its inevitable relations with unsympathetic neighbors just because they were neighbors; and she was specially ignorant of the class to which Mrs. Gresley and the Pratts belonged, and from which her aunt had in her lifetime unwisely guarded her niece as from the plague.  She was amazed at first at the Pratts calling her by her Christian name without her leave, until she discovered that they spoke of the whole county by their Christian names, even designating Lord Newhaven’s two younger brothers—­with whom they were not acquainted—­as Jack and Harry, though they were invariably called by their own family John and Henry.

When, after her aunt’s death, she had, by the advice of her few remaining relatives, taken up her abode with her brother, as much on his account as her own, for he was poor and with an increasing family, she journeyed to Warpington accompanied by a pleasant feeling that, at any rate, she was not going among strangers.  She had often visited in Middleshire, at Wilderleigh, in the elder Mr. Loftus’s time, for whom she had entertained an enthusiastic reverence; at Westhope Abbey, where she had a firm ally in Lord Newhaven, and at several other Middleshire houses.  She was silly enough to think she knew Middleshire fairly well, but after she settled at Warpington she gradually discovered the existence of a large undercurrent of society of which she knew nothing at all, in which, whether she were willing or not, she was plunged by the fact that she was her brother’s sister.