With aching hands and bleeding feet

    We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;

We bear the burden and the heat

    Of the long day, and wish ’twere done!

    Not till the hours of light return,

    All we have built do we discern.

— MATTHEW ARNOLD.

IT was Sunday morning. The night was sinking out of the sky to lean faint unto death upon the bosom of the earth. The great forms of the trees, felt rather than seen, were darkness made visible. Among the night of high elms round Warpington a single yellow light burned in an upper window. It had been burning all night. And now, as the night waned, the little light waned with it. At last, it was suddenly blown out.

Hester came to the window and looked out. There was light, but there was no dawn as yet. In the grey sky over the grey land the morning star, alone and splendid, kept watch in the east.

She sat down and leaned her brow against the pane. She did not know that it was aching. She did not know that she was cold, exhausted, so exhausted that the morning star in the outer heaven and the morning star in her soul were to her the same. They stooped together, they merged into one great light, heralding a perfect day presently to be.

The night was over, and that other long night of travail and patience and faith, and strong rowing in darkness against the stream, was over, too, at last — at last. The book was finished.

The tears fell slowly from Hester’s eyes on to her clasped hands, those blessed tears which no human hand shall ever intervene to wipe away.

To some of us Christ comes in the dawn of the spiritual life walking upon the troubled waves of art. And we recognise Him, and would fain go to meet Him. But our companions and our own fears dissuade us. They say it is only a spirit, and that Christ does not walk on water, that the land whither we are rowing is the place He has Himself appointed for us to meet Him. So our little faith keeps us in the boat, or fails us in the waves of that wind-swept sea.

It seemed to Hester as if once, long ago, shrinking and shivering, she had stood in despair upon the shore of a great sea, and had heard a voice from the other side say, “Come over.” She had stopped her ears, she had tried not to go. She had shrunk back a hundred times from the cold touch of the water that each time she essayed let her trembling foot through it. And now, after an interminable interval, after she had trusted and doubted, had fallen and been sustained, had met the wind and the rain, after she had sunk in despair, and risen again, she knew not how, now at length a great wave — the last — had cast her up half-drowned upon the shore. A miracle had happened. She had reached the other side, and was lying in a great peace after the storm upon the solemn shore under a great white star.

Hester sat motionless. The star paled and paled before the coming of a greater than he. Across the pause which God has set ‘twixt night and day came the first word of the robin. It reached Hester’s ear as from another world, a world that had been left behind. The fragmentary notes floated up to her from an immeasurable distance like scattered bubbles through deep water.

The day was coming. God’s creatures of tree and field and hill took form. Man’s creature, the little stout church in their midst, thrust once more its plebeian outline against God’s sky. Dim shapes moved athwart the vacancy of the meadows. Voices called through the grey. Close against the eaves a secret was twittered, was passed from beak to beak. In the nursery below a little twitter of waking children broke the stillness of the house.

But Hester did not hear it. She had fallen into a deep sleep in the low window-seat, with her pale forehead against the pane; a sleep so deep that even the alarum of the baby did not rouse her, nor the entrance of Emma with the hot water.

“James,” said Mrs. Gresley, an hour later, as she and her husband returned through the white mist from early celebration, “Hester was not there. I thought she had promised to come.”

“She had.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Perhaps she is not well,” said Mr. Gresley, closing the churchyard gate into the garden.

Mrs. Gresley’s heart swelled with a sense of injustice. She had often been unwell, often in feeble health before the birth of her children, but had she ever pleaded ill-health as an excuse for absenting herself from one of the many services which her husband held to be the mainspring of the religious life?

“I do not think she can be very unwell. She is standing by the magnolia now,” she said, her lip quivering, and withdrawing her hand from her husband’s arm. She almost hated the slight graceful figure, which was not of her world, which was, as she thought, coming between her and her husband.

“I will speak seriously to her,” said Mr. Gresley, dejectedly, who recollected that he had “spoken seriously” to Hester many times at his wife’s instigation without visible result. And as he went alone to meet his sister he prayed earnestly that he might be given the right word to say to her.

A ray of sunlight, faint as an echo, stole through the lingering mist, parting it on either hand, and fell on............