-upon that, at least, they were
agreed--and from their determination never to have another arose a
deliberate avoidance of any plain speaking. Rachel, longing for honesty,
found herself caught in a thousand deceits--Roddy, avoiding any kind of
analysis, found that everything that he provided in conversation seemed
to lead to danger.

He was now always ill at ease in Rachel's company; he had stood on that
fatal evening, more strongly for the Beaminster interest than he had
intended, but from his very determination to maintain his new
independence, he produced the Duchess for Rachel's benefit at every turn
of the road.

Roddy knew that the Duchess feared that Rachel would lead him from her
side and that she received with rejoicing every sign on his part of
irritation against Rachel. She had wanted him to marry her granddaughter
because that bound him more closely to her, but she had not, perhaps,
been prepared for the probable effect of Rachel's character upon him.

The Duchess therefore made, throughout these months, a third member of
their company. Roddy, finding Rachel's society a growing embarrassment,
spent more and more of his time with his animals and his tenants and
labourers. But all this time he was conscious, in a dumb way, of
unhappiness and a puzzled dismay, so that his very affection for Rachel
produced in him a growing irritation that it should be so needlessly
thwarted. Things were all wrong and his resentment of his own failure to
right them reacted, without his will, upon the very person whom he
wished to propitiate.

For Rachel these months were baffling in their hideous discomfort. Her
affection for Roddy was there, but it was swallowed by her desperate
efforts to analyse a situation that was, in definite outline, no
situation at all.

As Roddy withdrew, her loneliness wrapped her round, and in every day
that added to her distance from Roddy she saw the active and malignant
agency of her grandmother. She was intelligent enough to be aware that
in this constant vision of the Duchess she was outstepping the
probabilities; but her early years and the precipitation with which she
had been shot out of them into an atmosphere that unexpectedly resembled
their own earlier surroundings seemed to point to some diabolical
agency.

"Oh! when I get free of this," had been her earlier cry, and now the
foreboding that she was never to be free of it until she died terrified
her with its possibility. Imagine h