As Hester and Rachel sat together in the Vicarage drawing-room, Rachel’s faithful, doglike eyes detected no trace of tears in Hester’s dancing, mischievous ones.  They were alone, for the Bishop had dropped Rachel on his way to visit a sick clergyman, and had arranged to call at the Vicarage on his way back.

Hester quickly perceived that Rachel did not wish to talk of herself, and drew a quaint picture of her own life at Warpington, which she described “not wisely but too well.”  But she was faithful to her salt.  She said nothing of the Gresleys to which those worthies could have objected had they been present.  Indeed, she spoke of them in what they would have termed “a very proper manner,” of their kindness to her when she had been ill, of how Mr. Gresley had himself brought up her breakfast-tray every morning, and how, in the spring, he had taught her to bicycle.

“But, oh!  Rachel,” added Hester, “during the last nine months my self-esteem has been perforated with wounds, each large enough to kill the poor creature.  My life here has shown me horrible faults in myself of which I never dreamed.  I feel as if I had been ironed all over since I came here, and all kinds of ugly words in invisible ink are coming out clear in the process.”

“I am quite alarmed,” said Rachel, tranquilly.

“You ought to be.  First of all I did think I cared nothing about food.  I don’t remember ever giving it a thought when I lived with Aunt Susan.  But here I—­I am difficult about it.  I do try to eat it, but often I really can’t.  And then I leave it on my plate, which is a disgusting habit, which always offends me in other people.  Now I am as bad as any of them; indeed, it is worse in me because I know poor James is not very rich.”

“I suppose the cooking is vile?”

“I don’t know.  I never noticed what I ate till I came here, so I can’t judge.  Perhaps it is not very good.  But the dreadful part is that I should mind.  I could not have believed it of myself.  James and Minna never say anything, but I know it vexes them, as of course it must.”

Rachel looked critically at Hester’s innocent, childlike face.  When Hester was not a cultivated woman of the world she was a child.  There was, alas! no medium in her character.  Rachel noticed how thin her face and hands had become, and the strained look in the eyes.  The faint color in her cheek had a violet tinge.

She did not waste words on the cookery question.  She saw plainly enough that Hester’s weak health was slipping further down the hill.

“And all this time you have been working?”

“If you call it working.  I used to call it so once, but I never do now.  Yes, I manage about four hours a day.  I have made another pleasant discovery about myself—­that I have the temper of a fiend if I am interrupted.”

“But surely you told the Gresleys when first you came that you must not be interrupted at certain hours?”