little about the room.

He stopped beside his sister and put his hand on her shoulder:

"If there's anything I can ever do to help you, Adela, tell me----!" he
said.

"Thank you, John," she answered.

II

Rachel had never understood why it was that she was driven so constantly
into her grandmother's presence. The impulse that drove her had in it,
perhaps, something of defiance and something of challenge as though she
cried to some weakness in her that it should not master her and that she
would just show it how little those visits mattered to her. It had all
begun from some reason of that kind, and lately, when she grew older,
she discovered that her grandmother was more terrible through
imagination than she was through actual vision.

There was never absent from Rachel a lurking presentiment of what her
grandmother might one day do, and she went to see her now to discover
what she might be at, to prove to her that, whatever she be doing,
Rachel was "up" to her.

On this particular occasion the visit was a very brief one, but there
was one moment in it that after events always produced for Rachel as a
most definite and (on the part of the Duchess) omniscient omen.

Rachel had said that she had come in only for a moment to say good-bye.
She had talked a little and then, rising, stood by the fire.

As she stood there her grandmother suddenly looked at her--a glance that
Rachel had not been intended to catch. There was there a malicious
humour, a consciousness of some power, of some disaster that could be
delivered, triumphantly, at an instant's notice.

Very swiftly Rachel gathered her control, but she had felt what that
look conveyed.

"Francis ... she knows ... what is she going to do?"

She strung her slim, tall figure to its finest restraint and without a
quiver in her voice (her heart was beating wildly), "Good-bye,
grandmamma. I promised Roddy to be back."

But the old lady looked at her--

"How you do hate me, my dear," she said almost complacently.

Rachel compelled the other's eyes. "Would I come to see you so often if
I did?" she said.

"Yes, my dear, you would. You've got a sense of humour hidden somewhere
although, God knows, we've seen little enough of it lately. Oh! yes,
you'd come all right--if it were only to see me growing older and
older."

Rachel turned flaming. "There, at any rate, you're unjust. It's you that
have always hated me from the beginning--since I was small. Hated me,