It seemed to Hester as if once, long ago, shrinking and shivering, she had stood in despair upon the shore of a great sea, and had heard a voice from the other side say, “Come over.”  She had stopped her ears; she had tried not to go.  She had shrunk back a hundred times from the cold touch of the water that each time she essayed let her trembling foot through it.  And now, after an interminable interval, after she had trusted and doubted, had fallen and been sustained, had met the wind and the rain, after she had sunk in despair and risen again, she knew not how, now at length a great wave—­the last—­had cast her up half drowned upon the shore.  A miracle had happened.  She had reached the other side, and was lying in a great peace after the storm upon the solemn shore under a great white star.

Hester sat motionless.  The star paled and paled before the coming of a greater than he.  Across the pause which God has set ’twixt night and day came the first word of the robin.  It reached Hester’s ear as from another world—­a world that had been left behind.  The fragmentary notes floated up to her from an immeasurable distance, like scattered bubbles through deep water.

The day was coming.  God’s creatures of tree and field and hill took form.  Man’s creature, the little stout church in their midst, thrust once more its plebeian outline against God’s sky.  Dim shapes moved athwart the vacancy of the meadows.  Voices called through the gray.  Close against the eaves a secret was twittered, was passed from beak to beak.  In the nursery below a little twitter of waking children broke the stillness of the house.

But Hester did not hear it.  She had fallen into a deep sleep in the low window-seat, with her pale forehead against the pane; a sleep so deep that even the alarum of the baby did not rouse her, nor the entrance of Emma with the hot water.

* * * * *

“James,” said Mrs. Gresley, an hour later; as she and her husband returned through the white mist from early celebration, “Hester was not there.  I thought she had promised to come.”

“She had.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Perhaps she is not well,” said Mr. Gresley, closing the church-yard gate into the garden.

Mrs. Gresley’s heart swelled with a sense of injustice.  She had often been unwell, often in feeble health before the birth of her children, but had she ever pleaded ill-health as an excuse for absenting herself from one of the many services which her husband held to be the main-spring of the religious life?

“I do not think she can be very unwell.  She is standing by the magnolia now,” she said, her lip quivering, and withdrawing her hand from her husband’s arm.  She almost hated the slight, graceful figure, which was not of her world, which was, as she thought, coming between her and her husband.

“I will speak seriously to her,” said Mr. Gresley, dejectedly, who recollected that he had “spoken seriously” to Hester many times at his wife’s instigation without visible result.  And as he went alone to meet his sister he prayed earnestly that he might be given the right word to say to her.