“They are so sweet,” she said plaintively to the silence of her own bedroom as she looked some of her purchases over.  “I don’t know why they give me such a feeling.  They look so little and—­helpless, and as if they were made to hold in one’s arms.  It’s absurd of me, I daresay.”

The morning the boxes arrived at The Kennel Farm, Emily came too.  She was in the big carriage, and carried with her some special final purchases she wanted to bring herself.  She came because she could not have kept away.  She wanted to see the things again, to be with Hester when she unpacked them, to help her, to look them all over, to touch them and hold them in her hands.

She found Hester in the large, low-ceilinged room in which she slept.  The big four-post bed was already snowed over with a heaped-up drift of whiteness, and open boxes were scattered about.  There was an odd expression in the girl’s eyes, and she had a red spot on either cheek.

“I did not expect anything like this,” she said.  “I thought I should have to make some plain, little things myself, suited to its station,” with a wry smile.  “They would have been very ugly.  I don’t know how to sew in the least.  You forget that you were not buying things for a prince or a princess, but for a little beggar.”

“Oh, don’t!” cried Emily, taking both her hands.  “Let us be happy!  It was so nice to buy them.  I never liked anything so much in my life.”

She went and stood by the bedside, taking up the things one by one, touching up frills of lace and smoothing out tucks.

“Doesn’t it make you happy to look at them?” she said.

“You look at them,” said Hester, staring at her, “as if the sight of them made you hungry, or as if you had bought them for yourself.”

Emily turned slightly away.  She said nothing.  For a few moments there was a dead silence.

Hester spoke again.  What in the world was it in the mere look of the tall, straight body of the woman to make her feel hot and angered.

“If you had bought them for yourself,” she persisted, “they would be worn by a Marquis of Walderhurst.”

Emily laid down the robe she had been holding.  She put it on the bed, and turned round to look at Hester Osborn with serious eyes.

“They may be worn by a Marquis of Walderhurst, you know,” she answered.  “They may.”

She was remotely hurt and startled, because she felt in the young woman something she had felt once or twice before, something resentful in her thoughts of herself, as if for the moment she represented to her an enemy.

The next moment, however, Hester Osborn fell upon her with embraces.

“You are an angel to me,” she cried.  “You are an angel, and I can’t thank you.  I don’t know how.”

Emily Walderhurst patted her shoulder as she kindly enfolded her in warm arms.

“Don’t thank me,” she half whispered emotionally.  “Don’t.  Just let us enjoy ourselves.”