As to Hester herself, she seemed to have been keeping the Fox-Wilton household in perpetual fear. She went about in her mocking, mysterious way, denying that she knew anything about Sir Philip Meryon, or had any dealings with him. Yet it was shrewdly suspected that letters had passed between them, and Hester's proceedings were so quick-silverish and incalculable that it was impossible to keep a constant watch upon her. In the wilderness of Maudeley Park, which lay directly between the two houses, they might quite well have met--they probably had met. Meynell noticed and rebuked in himself a kind of settled pessimism as to Hester's conduct and future. "Do what you will," it seemed to say--"do all you can--but that life has in it the ferments of tragedy." Had they at least been doing all they could? he asked himself anxiously, vowing that no public campaign must or should distract him from a private trust much older than it, and no less sacred. In the midst of the turmoil of these weeks he had been corresponding on Lady Fox-Wilton's behalf with a lady in Paris to whom a girl of Hester's age and kind might be safely committed for the perfecting of her French and music. It had been necessary to warn the lady that in the case of such a pensionnaire as Hester the male sex might give trouble; and Hester had not yet signified her gracious consent to go. But she would go--she must go--and either he or Alice Puttenham would take her over and install her. Good heavens, if one had only Edith Fox-Wilton to depend on in these troubles! As for Philip Meryon, he was, of course, now and always, a man of vicious habits and no scruples. He seemed to be staying at Sandford with the usual crew of flashy, disreputable people, and to allow Hester to run any risks with regard to him would be simply criminal. Yet with so inefficient a watch-dog as Lady Fox-Wilton, who could guarantee anything? Alice, of course, thought of nothing else than Hester, night and day. But it was part of the pathos of the situation that she had so little influence on the child's thoughts and deeds. Poor, lonely woman! In Alice's sudden friendship for Mary Elsmere, her junior by some twelve years, the Rector, with an infinite pity, read the confession of a need that had become at last intolerable. For these seventeen years he had never known her make an intimate friend, and to see her now with this charming, responsive girl was to realize what the long hunger for affection must have been. Yet even now, how impossible to satisfy it, as other women could satisfy it! What ghosts and shadows about the path of friendship!