aminster, was hateful, whose sudden memories and instincts,
whose swift alarms and fore-warnings were so shattering to every
clinging security that life might offer--this Rachel knew nothing of
Roddy Seddon.

He was there to take her away from that, to drive it all into darkness,
to reassure her against its return, and marriage with him would mean
release, security, best of all freedom from her grandmother who knew, so
well, that life in her and loved to play with that knowledge. Her colour
rose and her eyes shone as she thought of what this so early escape from
the Portland Place house would mean to her. Already, in her first
season, to be free of it all--to be free of humbug and deception--Oh!
for that would she not surrender everything in the world?

Roddy, as she pictured him, with his clean life, his love of nature, his
kindliness, seemed, just then, the safest refuge that would ever be
offered to her.

And at that, without reason, she saw before her her cousin Francis
Breton. Several times she had met him since that first occasion at
Lizzie Rand's. Once again at Lizzie's and twice in Regent's Park when
she had been walking with May.

Yes--that was all. Thinking of it now the meetings appeared to her
almost infinite. Between each actual encounter intimacy seemed to leap
in its progress, and although, on at least two of them, he had only
walked with her for the shortest period, yet, always with them, she was
conscious of the number of things that, between them, did not need to be
said--knowledge that they shared.

In all this there was, with her, a confusion of motives and sensations
that, at present, refused to be disentangled. For one thing there was,
in all of this, a furtiveness, a secrecy, that she loathed. Against
that was the persuasion that it would be the finest thing in the world
for her to bring him back into the Beaminster fold, not, of course, that
he should remain there (he was far too strong and adventurous for that),
but that, accepted there, he could use it as a springing-off board for
success and fortune. Let her once, as the situation now was, say a word
to Uncle John or the others, and that of course was the end....

She knew, quite definitely, that now she wished that she had never met
him.

He had been, during these weeks, the only influence that had drawn that
other Rachel to the light. It was always that other Rachel that met
him--someone alarming, rebellious, conscious of unhappiness