overcame her. In two days had
happened enough for two years. It was staggering to think that only
two days earlier she had been dreaming of him as of a star. Could
so much, indeed, happen in two days? She imagined blissfully, in her
ignorance of human experience, that her case was without precedent.
Nay, her case appalled her in the rapidity of its development! And was
thereby the more thrilling! She thought again: "Yes, I could die
for him--and I would!" He was still the star, but--such was the
miracle--she clasped him.

They heard Mrs. Tams knocking at the door. Nothing would ever cure the
charwoman's habit of knocking before entering. Rachel arose from the
sofa as out of a bush of blossoms. And in the artless, honest glance
of her virginity and her simplicity, her eyes seemed to say to Mrs.
Tams: "Behold the phoenix among men! He is to be my husband." Her
pride in the strange, wondrous, incredible state of being affianced
was tremendous, to the tragic point.

"Can ye hear, begging yer pardon?" said Mrs. Tams, pointing through
the open door and upward. "Her's just begun to breathe o' that'n [like
that]."

The loud, stertorous sound of Mrs. Maldon unconsciously drawing the
final breaths of life filled the whole house. Louis and Rachel glanced
at each other, scared, shamed, even horrified, to discover that the
vast pendulum of the universe was still solemnly ticking through their
ecstasy.

"I'm coming," said Rachel.

CHAPTER IX

THE MARRIED WOMAN

I

Wonderful things happen. If anybody had foretold to Mrs. Tams that in
her fifty-eighth year she would accede to the honourable order of the
starched white cap, Mrs. Tams could not have credited the prophecy.
But there she stood, in the lobby of the house at Bycars, frocked
in black, with the strings of a plain but fine white apron stretched
round her stoutness, and the cap crowning her grey hair. It was Louis
who had insisted on the cap, which Rachel had thought unnecessary
and even snobbish, and which Mrs. Tams had nervously deprecated.
Not without pleasure, however, had both women yielded to his indeed
unanswerable argument: "You can't possibly have a servant opening the
door without a cap. It's unthinkable."

Thus in her latter years of grandmotherhood had Mrs. Tams cast off
the sackcloth of the charwoman and become a glorious domestic servant,
with a room of her own in the house, and no responsibilities beyond
the house, and no right to leave the h