well as stable. Perhaps Mrs. Ambrose had some idea that
in leading the talk into these quarters she might discover what was in
Rachel's mind, but it was difficult to judge, for sometimes she would
agree with the gloomiest thing that was said, at other times she refused
to listen, and rammed Helen's theories down her throat with laughter,
chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and fierce bursts of anger even at
what she called the "croaking of a raven in the mud."

"It's hard enough without that," she asserted.

"What's hard?" Helen demanded.

"Life," she replied, and then they both became silent.

Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why
an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid
that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a
spectator. True to her creed, she did not attempt to interfere, although
there were enough of those weak moments of depression to make it
perfectly easy for a less scrupulous person to press through and know
all, and perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose. All these
moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen compared to
the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker still, as it races to a
waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out Stop! but even had there been
any use in crying Stop! she would have refrained, thinking it best that
things should take their way, the water racing because the earth was
shaped to make it race.

It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was watched, or
that there was anything in her manner likely to draw attention to her.
What had happened to her she did not know. Her mind was very much in the
condition of the racing water to which Helen compared it. She wanted
to see Terence; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he was not
there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were strewn all about
her day on account of him, but she never asked herself what this force
driving through her life arose from. She thought of no result any more
than a tree perpetually pressed downwards by the wind considers the
result of being pressed downwards by the wind.

During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk, half a
dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She would read
them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness; the sunny land
outside the window being no less capable of analysing its own colour
and heat than she was of