Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life — the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it — can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

— GEORGE ELIOT.

HESTER in the meanwhile was expressing wonder and astonishment at the purchases of the children, who, with the exception of Mary, had spent their little all on presents for Fraülein, whose birthday was on the morrow. After Mary’s tiny white bone umbrella had been discovered to be a needle-case, and most of the needles had been recovered from the floor, Regie extracted from its paper a little china cow. But, alas! the cow’s ears and horns remained in the bag, owing possibly to the incessant passage of the parcel from one pocket to another on the way home. Regie looked at the remnants in the bag and his lip quivered, while Mary, her own umbrella safely warehoused, exclaimed, “Oh! Regie” in tones of piercing reproach.

But Hester quickly suggested that she could put them on again quite easily, and Fraülein would like it just as much. Still it was a blow. Regie leaned his head against Hester’s shoulder.

Hester pressed her cheek against his little dark head. Sybell Loftus had often told Hester that she could have no idea of the happiness of a child’s touch till she was a mother: that she herself had not an inkling till then. But perhaps some poor substitute for that exquisite feeling was vouchsafed to Hester.

“The tail is still on,” she whispered, not too cheerfully, but as one who in darkness sees light beyond.

The cow’s tail was painted in blue upon its side.

“When I bought it,” said Regie, in a strangled voice, “and it was a great deal of money cow, I did wish its tail had been out behind; but I think now it is safer like that.”

“All the best cows have their tails on the side,” said Hester. “And to-morrow morning, when you are dressed, run up to my room, and you will find it just like it was before.” And she carefully put aside the bits with the injured animal.

“And now what has Stella got?”

Stella produced a bag of “bull’s-eyes” which, in striking contrast with the cow, had, in the course of the drive home, cohered so tightly together that it was doubtful if they would ever be separated again.

“Fraülein never eats bull’s-eyes,” said Mary, who was what her parents called “a very truthful child.”

“I eats them,” said Stella, reversing her small cauliflower-like person on the sofa, till only a circle of white rims with a nucleus of coventry frilling, with two pink legs kicking gently upwards, were visible.

Stella always turned upside down if the conversation took a personal turn. In later and more conventional years we find a poor equivalent for marking our disapproval by changing the subject.

Hester had hardly set Stella right side upwards when the door opened once more and Mrs. Gresley entered, hot and exhausted.

“Run upstairs, my pets,” she said. “Hester, you should not keep them down here now. It is past their tea-time.”

“We came ourselves, mother,” said Regie. “Fraülein said we might, to show Auntie Hester our secrets.”

“Well, never mind; run away now,” said the poor mother, sitting down heavily in a low chair, “and take Boulou.”

“You are tired out,” said Hester, slipping on to her knees and unlacing her sister-in-law’s brown boots.

Mrs. Gresley looked with a shade of compunction at the fragile kneeling figure, with its face crimsoned by the act of stooping, and by the obduracy of the dust-ingrained bootlaces. But as she looked she noticed the flushed cheeks, and being a diviner of spirits, wondered what Hester was ashamed of now.

As Hester rose her sister-in-law held out, with momentary hesitation, a thin paper bag, in which an oval form allowed its moist presence to be discerned by partial adhesion to its envelope.

“I saw you ate no luncheon, Hester, so I have brought you a little sole for supper.”

Some of us poor Marthas spend all our existence, so to speak, in the kitchens of life. We never get so far as the drawing-room. Our conquests, our self-denials are achieved through the medium of suet and lard and necks of mutton. We wrestle with the dripping, and rise on stepping-stones — not of our dead selves, but of sheep and oxen — to higher things.

The sole was a direct answer to prayer. Mrs. Gresley had been enabled to stifle her irritation against this delicate, whimsical, fine lady of a sister-in-law — laced in, too, we must not forget that — who, in Mrs. Gresley’s ideas, knew none of the real difficulties of life, its butcher’s bills, its monthly nurses, its constant watchfulness over delicate children, its long, long strain at two ends which won’t meet. We must know but little of our fellow creatures if the damp sole in the bag appears to us other than the outward and homely sign of an inward and spi............