ing these days that Rachel passed in spite of herself beyond the
anxious impersonal interest which Hugh had awakened in her, on to that
slippery much-trodden ground of uncomfortable possibilities where the
unmarried meet.

Hugh attracted and repelled her.

It was, alas! easy to say why she was repelled. But who shall say why
she was attracted? Has the secret law ever been discovered which draws
one man and woman together amid the crowd? Hugh was not among the best
men who had wished to marry her, but nevertheless he was the only man
since Mr. Tristram who had succeeded in making her think continually of
him. And perhaps she half knew that though she had been loved by better
men, Hugh loved her better than they had.

Which would prove the stronger, the attraction or the repulsion?

"How can I?" she said to herself, over and over again.

"When I remember Lady Newhaven, how can I? When I think of what his
conduct was for a whole year, how can I? Can he have any sense of honor
to have acted like that? Is he even really sorry? He is very charming,
very refined, and he loves me. He looks good, but what do I know of him
except evil? He looks as if he could be faithful, but how can I trust
him?"

Hugh fell into a deep dejection after his narrow escape. Dr. Brown said
it was nervous prostration, and Doll rode into Southminster and returned
laden with comic papers. Who shall say whether the cause was physical or
mental? Hugh had seen death very near for the first time, and the
thought of death haunted him. He had not realized when he drew lots that
he was risking the possibility of anything like _that_, such an entire
going away, such an awful rending of his being as the short word _death_
now conveyed to him. He had had no idea it would be like _that_. And he
had got to do it again. There was the crux. He had got to do it again.

He leaned back faint and shuddering in the deck-chair in the rose-garden
where he was lying.

Presently Rachel appeared, coming towards him down the narrow grass walk
between two high walls of hollyhocks. She had a cup of tea in her hand.

"I have brought you this," she said, "with a warning that you had better
not come in to tea. Mr. Gresley has been sighted walking up the drive.
Mrs. Loftus thought you would like to see him, but I reminded her that
Dr. Brown said you were to be kept very quiet."

Mr. Gresley had called every day since the accident in order to cheer
the sufferer, to whom he