A ray of sunlight, faint as an echo, stole through the lingering mist, parting it on either hand, and fell on Hester.

Hester, standing in a white gown under the veiled trees in a glade of silver and trembling opal, which surely mortal foot had never trod, seemed infinitely removed from him.  Dimly he felt that she was at one with this mysterious morning world, and that he, the owner, was an alien and a trespasser in his own garden.

But a glimpse of his cucumber-frames in the background reassured him.  He advanced with a firmer step, as one among allies.

Hester did not hear him.

She was gazing with an absorption that shut out all other sights and sounds at the solitary blossom on the magnolia-tree.  Yesterday it had been a bud; but to-day the great almond-white petals which guarded it, overlapping each other so jealously, had opened wide, and the perfect flower, keeping nothing back, had laid bare all its pure white soul before its God.

As Mr. Gresley stopped beside her, Hester turned her little pinched, ravaged face towards him and smiled.  Something of the passionate self-surrender of the flower was reflected in her eyes.

“Dear Hester,” he said, seeing only the wan, drawn face.  “Are you ill?”

“Yes—­no.  I don’t think so,” said Hester, tremulously, recalled suddenly to herself.  She looked hastily about her.  The world of dew and silver had deserted her, had broken like an iridescent bubble at a touch.  The magnolia withdrew itself.  Hester found herself suddenly transplanted into the prose of life, emphasized by a long clerical coat and a bed of Brussels sprouts.

“I missed you,” said Mr. Gresley, with emphasis.

“Where?  When?” Hester’s eyes had lost their fixed look and stared vacantly at him.

Mr. Gresley tried to subdue his rising annoyance.

Hester was acting, pretending not to understand, and he saw through it.

“At God’s altar,” he said, gravely, the priest getting the upper hand of the man.

“Have you not found me there?” said Hester, below her breath, but so low that fortunately her brother did not catch the words, and was spared their profanity.

“I will appeal to her better feelings,” he said to himself.  “They must be there, if I can only touch them.”

He did not know that in order to touch the better feelings of our fellow-creatures we must be able to reach up to them, or by reason of our low stature we may succeed only in appealing to the lowest in them, in spite of our tiptoe good intentions.  Is that why such appeals too often meet with bitter sarcasm and indignation?

But fortunately a robust belief in the assiduities of the devil as the cause of all failures, and a conviction that who-so opposed Mr. Gresley opposed the Deity, supported and blindfolded the young Vicar in emergencies of this kind.