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.