ow dragged him through
the slush, and trod on him and hated him. Then the bitter thought
came that what she had suffered for him who had given him everything,
he could never repay by one kind word or look. Lost she was to him
forever and ever, and parted from him by a yet wider gulf than eight
hundred miles of sea. Such was the agony of his shame, and through it
all the snore of the sleeping woman went like iron through his head,
so that at last he wrapped his arms about it and sobbed out to the
dead fire at his feet, "Rachel! Rachel! Rachel!"

All at once he became conscious that the heavy breathing had ceased,
that the house was silent, that something had touched him on the
shoulder, and that a gaunt shadow stood beside him. It was the woman,
who at the sound of his voice had arisen from her drunken sleep, and
now gasped,

"Who is Rachel?"

At that word his blood ran cold, and shivering in his clothes, he
crouched lower at the hearth, neither answering her nor looking up.

Then with eyes of hate she cried again,

"Who is Rachel?"

But the only voice that answered her was the voice that rang within
him--"I'm a lost man, God help me."

"Who is Rachel?" the woman cried once more, and the sound of that
name from her lips, hardening it, brutalizing it, befouling it, was
the most awful thing by which his soul had yet been shaken out of its
stupor.

"Who is she, I say? Answer me," she cried in a raging voice; but he
crouched there still, with his haggard face and misty eyes turned
down.

Then she laid her hand on his shoulder and shook him, and cried
bitterly.

"Who is she, this light o' love--this baggage?"

At that he stiffened himself up, shuddered from head to foot, flung
her from him and answered in a terrible voice.

"Woman, she is my wife."

That word, like a thunderbolt, left a heavy silence behind it. Liza
stood looking in terror at Stephen's face, unable to utter a cry.

But next day she went to Parson Gell and told him all. She got small
comfort. Parson Gell had himself had two wives; the first had
deserted him, and after an interval of six years, in which he had not
heard from her, he had married the second. So to Liza he said,

"He may have sinned against the law, but what proof have you? None."

Then she went to the Deemster at Ramsey. It was Deemster Lace--a
bachelor much given to secret gallantries.

She got as little cheer from this source, but yet she came away with
one drop of solac