taking the hopeful view of everything!  How noble he looks!  These are days in which we should stick to our colors.  I wonder how he can think of such beautiful things.  For my part, I think the duty of the true priest is not to grovel to the crowd and call wrong right and right wrong for the sake of a fleeting popularity.  How striking!  What a lesson to the Bishop, if he were only here.  He is so lax about Dissent, as if right and wrong were mere matters of opinion!  What a gift he has!  I know he will eat nothing for luncheon.  If only we were somewhere else where the best joints were a little cheaper, and his talents more appreciated.”  And Mrs. Gresley closed her eyes and prayed earnestly, a tear sliding down her cheek on to Mary’s floss-silk mane, that she might become less unworthy to be the wife of one so far above her, that the children might all grow up like him, and that she might be given patience to bear with Hester even when she vexed him.

* * * * *

Captain Pratt’s critical eye travelled over the congregation.  It absolutely ignored Mrs. Gresley and Fraeulein.  It lingered momentarily on Hester.  He knew what he called “breeding” when he saw it, and he was aware that Hester possessed it, though his sisters would have laughed at the idea.  He had seen many well-bred women on social pinnacles look like that, whose houses were at present barred against him.  The Pratt sisters were fixed into their smartness as some faces are fixed into a grin.  It was not spontaneous, fugitive, evanescent as a smile, gracefully worn, or lightly laid aside, as in Hester’s case.  He had known Hester slightly in London for several years.  He had seen her on terms of intimacy, such as she never showed to his sisters, with inaccessible men and women with whom he had achieved a bare acquaintance, but whom, in spite of many carefully concealed advances, he had found it impossible to know better.  Captain Pratt had reached that stage in his profession of raising himself when he had become a social barometer.  He was excessively careful whom he knew, what women he danced with, what houses he visited; and any of his acquaintances who cared to ascertain their own social status to a hair’s-breadth had only to apply to it the touchstone of Captain Pratt’s manner towards them.

Hester, who grasped many facts of that kind, was always amused by the cold consideration with which he treated her on his rare visits to the parental Towers; and which his sisters could only construe as a sign that “Algy was gone on Hessie.”

“But he will never marry her,” they told each other.  “Algy looks higher.”