as they saw each other more she began to melt before the unselfish warmth of the other woman’s overtures of friendship. She was very lonely and totally inexperienced. As Agatha Slade had gradually fallen into intimacy of speech, so did she. She longed so desperately for companionship that the very intensity of her feelings impelled her to greater openness than she had at first intended.
“I suppose men don’t know,” she said to herself sullenly, in thinking of Osborn, who spent his days out of doors. “At any rate, they don’t care.”
Emily cared greatly, and was so full of interest and sympathy that there was something like physical relief in talking to her.
“You two have become great pals,” Alec said, on an afternoon when he stood at a window watching Lady Walderhurst’s carriage drive away. “You spend hours together talking. What is it all about?”
“She talks a good deal about her husband. It is a comfort to her to find someone to listen. She thinks he is a god. But we principally talk about—me.”
“Don’t discourage her,” laughed Osborn. “Perhaps she will get so fond of you that she will not be willing to part with us, as she will be obliged to take both to keep one.”
“I wish she would, I wish she would!” sighed Hester, tossing up her hands in a languid, yet fretted gesture.
The contrast between herself and this woman was very often too great to be equably borne. Even her kindness could not palliate it. The simple perfection of her country clothes, the shining skins of her horses, the smooth roll of her carriage, the automatic servants who attended her, were suggestive of that ease and completeness in all things, only to be compassed by long-possessed wealth. To see every day the evidences of it while one lived on charitable sufferance on the crumbs which fell from the master’s table was a galling enough thing, after all. It would always have been galling. But it mattered so much more now—so much more to Hester than she had known it could matter even in those days when as a girl she had thirstily longed for it. In those days she had not lived near enough to it all to know the full meaning and value of it—the beauty and luxury, the stateliness and good taste. To have known it in this way, to have been almost part of it and then to leave it, to go back to a hugger-mugger existence in a wretched bungalow hounded by debt, pinched and bound hard and fast by poverty, which offered no future prospect of bettering itself into decent good luck! Who could bear it?
Both were thinking the same thing as their eyes met.
“How are we to stand it, after this?” she cried out sharply.
“We can’t stand it,” he answered. “Confound it all, something must happen.”
“Nothing will,” she said; “nothing but that we shall go back worse off than before.”
*
At this period Lady Walderhurst went to London again to shop, and spent two entire happy days in buying beautiful things of various kinds, which were all to be sent to Mrs. Osborn at The Kennel Farm, Palstrey. She had never enjoyed herself so much in her life as she did during those two days when she sat for hours at one counter after another looking at exquisite linen and flannel and lace. The days she had spent with Lady Maria in purchasing her trousseau had not compared with these two. She looked actually lovely as she almost fondled the fine fabrics, smiling with warm softness at the pretty things shown her. She spent, in fact, good deal of money, and luxuriated in so doing as she should never have luxuriated in spending it in finery for herself. Nothing indeed seemed too fairy-like in its fineness, no quantity of lace seemed in excess. Her heart positively trembled in her breast sometimes, and she found strange tears rising in her eyes.
“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.”
Chapter Thirteen
Alec Osborn rode a good deal in these days. He also walked a good deal, sometimes with a gun over his shoulder and followed by a keeper, sometimes alone. There was scarcely a square yard of the Palstrey Manor lands he had not tramped over. He had learned the whole estate by heart, its woods, its farms, its moorlands. A morbid secret interest in its beauties and resources possessed him. He could not resist the temptation to ask apparently casual questions of keepers and farmers when he found himself with them. He managed to give his inquiries as much the air of accident as possible, but he himself knew that they were made as a result of a certain fevered curiosity. He found that he had fallen into the habit of continually making plans connected with the place. He said to himself, “If it were mine I would do this, or that. If I owned it, I would make this change or that one. I would discharge this keeper or put another man on such a farm.” He tramped among the heather thinking these things over, and realising to the full what the pleasure of such powers would mean to a man such as himself, a man whose vanity had never been fed, who had a desire to control and a longing for active out-of-door life.
“If