And all the time--instead of an unmarried girl, with the experiences of love and marriage before her--she had been already married--and divorced! Another man had loved and possessed her--and even if she were innocent--but of course she was innocent!--there must be some ugly story involved.

He tried to collect his thoughts--but all his consciousness seemed to be bruised and in pain. He could only put his hand on her hair, and say incoherent things,--

"Don't cry so, dear--don't cry!"

And even as he spoke he felt with bewilderment how--in a moment--their respective att.i.tudes had changed. She checked her sobs.

"Sit there!" she said, pointing peremptorily to a seat opposite. Then she looked round her.

"Where is Janet?"

"She went to the village."

Rachel dried her eyes, and with trembling hands smoothed her hair back from her face.

"I'll try and tell it shortly. It's a horrible tale."

"Do you feel able to tell it?"

For he was aghast at her pallor--the alteration in her whole aspect.

"I must," she wailed. "Weren't you--weren't you just going to ask me to marry you?"

Strange question!--strange frowning eyes!

"I was," he said gravely. "Didn't you know I should?"

"No, no, I didn't know!" she said piteously. "I was never _sure_--till you looked at me then. I wouldn't be sure!"

He said nothing. Speech was ice-bound till he had heard what she had to say.

"It all began to happen three years ago," she said hurriedly, hiding her face from him with her hand while she hung over the fire. "I was living with my brother, who was then near Winnipeg. He offered me a home after my father died. But he was married, and I didn't get on with his wife. I dare say it was my fault, but I wasn't happy, and I wanted to get away.

Then a man--an Englishman--bought the next section to us, and we began to know him. He was a gentleman--he'd been to Cambridge--his father had some land and a house in Lincolnshire. But he was the third son, and he'd been taught land agency, he said, as a training for the colonies.

That was all we knew. He was very good-looking, and he began courting me.

I suppose I was proud of his being a University man--a public school boy, and all that. He told me a lot of stories about his people, and his money--most of which were lies. But I was a fool--and I believed them. My brother tried to stop it. Well, you know from his letters what sort of man he is," and again she brushed the sudden tears away. "But his wife made mischief, and I was set on having a place of my own. So I stuck to it--and married him."

She rose abruptly from her seat and began to move restlessly about the room, taking up a book or her knitting from the table, and putting them down again, evidently unconscious of what she was doing. Ellesborough waited. His lean, sharply-cut face revealed a miserable, perhaps an agonized suspense. This crisis into which she had plunged him so suddenly was bringing home to him all that he had at stake. That she mattered to him so vitally he had never known till this moment.

"What's the good of going into it!" she said at last desperately. "You can guess--what it means"--a sudden crimson rushed to her cheeks--"to be tied to a man--without honour--or principle--or refinement--who presently seemed to me vile all through--in what he said--or what he did.

And I was at his mercy. I had married him in such a hurry he had a right to despise me, and he used it! And when I resisted and turned against him, then I found out what his temper meant." She raised her shoulders with a gesture which needed no words. "Well--we got on somehow till my little girl was born--"

Ellesborough started. Rachel turned on him her sad, swimming eyes. But the mere mention of her child had given her back her dignity and strength to go on. She became visibly more composed, as she stood opposite to him, her beautiful dark head against the sunset clouds outside.

"She only lived a few weeks. Her death was largely owing to him. But that's a long story. And after her death I couldn't stand it any more. I ran away. And soon I heard that he had taken up with an Italian girl.

There was a large camp of Italians on the C.P.R., quite close to us. She was the daughter of one of the foremen. So then my brother made me go to his lawyers in Winnipeg. We collected evidence very easily. I got my divorce eighteen months ago. The decree was made absolute last February.

So, of course, I'm quite free--quite--_quite_ free!"

She spoke the last words almost savagely, and after them she moved away to the window looking on the down, and stood gazing through it, as though she had forgotten Ellesborough's presence.

"The action was not defended?" he asked, in a low voice.

She shook her head without speaking. But after a minute she added,--

"I can show you the report."

There was silence. Ellesborough turned round, put his hands on the mantelpiece, and buried his face on them. Presently she approached him, looked at him with a quivering lip, and said in broken sentences,--

"It has all come so suddenly--hasn't it? I had been in such good spirits to-day, not thinking of those horrible things at all. I don't know what I meant to do, if you did ask me--for of course I knew you _might_. I suppose I intended to put off telling you--so as to be sure first--_certain_--that you loved me. And then--somehow--when you looked down on me like that, I felt--that _I_ cared--much more than I had thought I cared--too much to let you speak--before you knew--before I'd told you. It's always been my way--to--put off disagreeable things. And so I thought I could put this off. But every night I have been awake thinking--'if only he knew!'--and I was wretched--for a while--because you didn't know. But then it went away again--and I forgot it. One does forget things--everything--when one is hard at work. But I'm awfully sorry. And now--I think--we'd better say good-bye."

Her voice faltered against her will. He raised himself quickly.

"No--no," he said pa.s.sionately, "we won't say good-bye. But you must let me think--for you, as well as for myself."

"It would be better to say good-bye," she persisted. "I'm afraid--you expect in me--what I haven't got. I see that now. Because I'm keen about this work, and I can run this farm, you think--perhaps--I'm a strong character. But I'm not. I've no judgment--not in moral things. I give in--I'm weak--and then--I could kill myself!"

She had grown very white again--and her eyes were strangely fixed on him.

The words seemed to him incoherent, out of touch somehow even with their tragic conversation. But his first pa.s.sing bewilderment was lost in pity and pa.s.sion. He stopped, took her hand, and kissed it. He came nearer.

But again she drew back.

"There's Janet!" she said, "we can't talk any more."

For she had caught sight of Janet in the farm-yard, leading her bicycle.

"Can you meet me to-morrow evening--on the Common?" he said. "I could be there about six."

She frowned a little.

"Is it worth while?"

"I beg you!" he said huskily.

"Very well--I'll come. We shall be just friends, please."

"But, of course, I'll tell you more--if you wish."

Janet's voice and step were heard in the pa.s.sage. How Ellesborough got through the next ten minutes he never remembered. When they were over, he found himself rushing through the cool and silence of the autumn night, thankful for this sheltering nature in which to hide his trouble, his deep, deep distress.

VII

The October night rang stormily round Great End Farm. The northwest wind rushing over the miniature pa.s.s just beyond the farm, where the road dropped from the level of the upland in which Ips...o...b.. lay, to the level of the plain, was blowing fiercely on the square of buildings which stood naked and undefended against weather from that quarter of the heaven, while protected by the hills and the woods from the northeast. And mingled with the noisy or wailing gusts came the shrieking from time to time of one of the little brown owls that are now multiplying so fast in the English midlands.

The noise of the storm and the clamour of the owl were not the cause of Rachel's wakefulness; but they tended to make it more feverish and irritable. Every now and then she would throw off the bed-clothes, and sit up with her hands round her knees, a white and rigid figure lit by the solitary candle beside her. Then again she would feel the chill of the autumn night, and crouch down shivering among the bed-clothes, pining for a sleep that would not come. Instead of sleep, she could do nothing but rehea.r.s.e the scene with Ellesborough again and again. She watched the alterations in his face--she heard the changes in his voice--as she told her story. She was now as sorry for him as for herself! The tears came flooding into her eyes as she thought of him. In her selfish fears of his anger she had forgotten his suffering. But the first true love of her life was bringing understanding. She realized the shock to him, and wept over it. She saw, too, that she had been unjust and cowardly in letting the situation go so far without speaking; and that there was no real excuse for her.