After a few minutes she dropped over the low church-yard wall into the meadow below, and flung herself down on the grass in the short shadow of a yew near at hand.

What little air there was to be had came to her across the Drone, together with the sound of the water lazily nudging the bank and whispering to the reeds little jokelets which they had heard a hundred times before.
[Footnote A: A card, headed by the above text, was seen by the writer in August, 1898, in the porch of a country church.] Hester's irritable nerves relaxed.

She stretched out her small, neatly shod foot in front of her, leaned her back against the wall, and presently could afford to smile.
"Dear James," she said, shaking her head gently to and fro, "I wish we were not both writers, or, as he calls it, 'dabblers with the pen.' One dabbler in a vicarage is quite enough." She took out her letters and read them.

Only half of them had been opened.
"I shall stay here till the luncheon bell rings," she said, as she settled herself comfortably.
Rachel's letter was read last, on the principle of keeping the best to the end.
"And so she is leaving London--isn't this rather sudden ?--and coming down at once--to-day--no, yesterday, to Southminster, to the Palace.

And I am to stay in this afternoon, as she will come over, and probably the Bishop will come too.