“You would not have me treat him as a brother after that?”

“Of course not, because he would probably dislike that still more.”

At this moment a hurricane seemed to pass through the little house, and the three children rushed into the drawing-room, accompanied by Boulou, in a frantic state of excitement.  Boulou, like Hester, had no happy medium in his character.  He was what Mrs. Gresley called “very Frenchy,” and he now showed his Frenchyness by a foolish exhibition of himself in coursing round and round the room with his silly foreign tail crooked the wrong way.

“Mother got out at Mrs. Brown’s,” shrieked Regie, in his highest voice, “and I drove up.”

“Oh, Regie!” expostulated Mary the virtuous, the invariable corrector of the statements of others.  “You held the reins, but William walked beside.”

Hester made the children shake hands with her guests, and then they clustered round her to show what they had bought.

Though the Bishop was fond of children, he became suddenly restive.  He took out his watch, and was nervously surprised at the lapse of time.  The carriage was sent for, and in a few minutes that dignified vehicle was bowling back to Southminster.

“I am not satisfied about Hester,” said the Bishop.  “She looks ill and irritable, and she has the tense expression of a person who is making a colossal effort to be patient, and whose patience, after successfully meeting twenty calls upon it in the course of the day, collapses entirely at the twenty-first.  That is a humiliating experience.”

“She spoke as if she were a trial to her brother and his wife.”

“I think she is.  I have a sort of sympathy with Gresley as regards his sister.  He has been kind to her according to his lights, and if she could write little goody-goody books he would admire her immensely, and so would half the neighborhood.  It would be felt to be suitable.  But Hester jars against the preconceived ideas which depute that clergymen’s sisters and daughters should, as a matter of course, offer up their youth and hair and teeth and eyesight on the altar of parochial work.  She does and is nothing that long custom expects her to do and be.  Originality is out of place in a clergyman’s family, just because it is so urgently needed.  It is a constant source of friction.  But, on the other hand, the best thing that could happen to Hester is to be thrown for a time among people who regard her as a nonentity, who have no sense of humor, and to whom she cannot speak of any of the subjects she has at heart.  If Hester had remained in London after the success of her Idyll she would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next book would probably have suffered in consequence.  She is so susceptible, so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up steam.  There is no place for getting up steam like a country vicarage with an inner