"

"Perhaps; but he believed me guilty to the very end; and I utterly
refuse to see him to-night."

"Then I shall tell him so."

And the good doctor disappeared for the nonce, but was back in a couple
of minutes, full of the lawyer's expostulations. What did Mrs. Minchin
intend to do? Where did she propose to go? There were a hundred matters
for explanation and arrangement. Her solicitor said she had no friends,
and seemed himself most anxious to act in that capacity. Rachel's lips
curled at the thought.

"At least," said she, "I have the friends who guaranteed his bill, if
that has anything to say to his anxiety! But what I mean to do and where
I may go, are entirely my own affair. And as for the hundred matters he
mentions, he might have spoken of them during the week. Perhaps he
thought it would be waste of breath, but I should have appreciated the
risk."

So her solicitor was beaten off, with all the spirit which was one of
Rachel's qualities, but also with the rashness which was that quality's
defect. The man was indeed no ornament to his profession, but a
police-court practitioner of the pushing order, who had secured the case
for notoriety and nothing else. Rachel's soul sickened when she thought
of her interviews, and especially her most recent interviews, with one
whom she had never seen before her trouble, and whom she devoutly hoped
never to see again. She did not perceive that the time had come when the
lawyer might have been really useful to her. Yet his messages left her
more alive to the difficulties that lay before her as a free woman, and
to the immediate necessity of acting for herself once more.

After all there had been a silver lining to the cloud under which she
had lain so long. Others had acted for her. It had been a rest. But,
conscious of her innocence, and serene in that consciousness, she had
prepared herself rather for another life than for a new lease of this
one; and, while seeking to steel her soul to the awful sequel of a
conviction, in the other direction she had seldom looked beyond the
consummate incident of an acquittal. Life seems a royal road when it is
death that stares one in the face; but already Rachel saw the hills and
the pitfalls; for indeed they began under her nose.

She had no plans, nor a single soul to help her to make any. In all the
world she had no real friend. And yet, with the very independence to
which this isolation was largely due, she must pick and choo