hate him?"

"One can be sorry even for those one hates. I suppose God is," Janet
added, after a pause.

Rachel made a little face of scorn.

"Why should God hate any one? He made us. He's responsible. He must have
known what He was doing. If He really pitied us, would He have made us at
all?"

Janet made a little protesting sound--a sound of pain.

"Does it give you the shivers, old woman, when I talk like that?" Rachel
slipped her hand affectionately through Janet's arm. "Well, I won't,
then. But if--" she caught her breath a little--"if George casts me off,
don't expect me to sing psalms and take it piously. I don't know myself
just lately--I seem quite strange to myself."

And Janet, glancing at her sideways, wondered indeed where all that
rosy-cheeked, ripe bloom had gone, which so far had made the constant
charm of Rachel Henderson. Instead a bloodless face, with pinched lines,
and heavy-lidded eyes! What a formidable thing was this "love," that she
herself had never known, though she had had her quiet dreams of husband
and children, like her fellows.

Rachel, however, would not let herself be talked with or pitied. She
walked resolutely to the house, and went off to the fields to watch
Halsey cutting and trimming a hedge.

"If he doesn't come before dark," she said, under her breath, to Janet,
before setting off--"it will be finished. If he does--"

She hurried away without finishing the sentence, and was presently taking
a lesson from old Halsey, in what is fast becoming one of the rarest of
the rural arts. But in little more than half an hour, Janet bringing in
the cows, saw her return and go into the house. The afternoon was still
lovely--the sky, a pale gold, with thin bars of grey cloud lying across
it, and the woods, all delicate shades of brown and purple, with their
topmost branches clear against the gold. The old red walls and tiled
roofs of the farm, the fields, the great hay and straw stacks, were all
drenched in the soft winter light.

Rachel went up to her room, and sat down before the bare deal
dressing-table which held her looking-glass, and the very few articles of
personal luxury she possessed; a pair of silver-backed brushes and a
hand-glass that had belonged to an aunt, a small leather case in which
she kept some modest trinkets--a pearl brooch, a bracelet or two, and a
locket that had been her mother's--and, standing on either side of the
glass, two photographs of her father and mot