."

"Like enough!" snapped Rachel. "She sinned not open-eyed, as did Adam.
She trusted a man-devil, like too many of her daughters sithence, and
she and they alike have found bitter cause to rue the day they did it."

Sir Piers prudently discovered that Lady Enville was asking him a
question, and let Rachel alone thereafter.

Ay, Lysken Barnevelt adopted from choice the life to which Clare had
been only willing to resign herself because she thought it was the
Father's will. It amused Lysken to hear people pity her as one who had
failed to win the woman's aim in life. To have failed to obtain what
she had never sought, and did not want, was in Lysken's eyes an easily
endurable affliction. The world was her home, while she passed through
it on her journey to the better Home: and all God's family were her
brethren or her children. The two sisters from Enville Court were both
happy and useful in their corners of the great harvest-field; but she
was the happiest, and the best loved, and when God called her the most
missed of all--this solitary Lysken. Distinguished by no unusual habit,
fettered by no unnatural vow, she went her quiet, peaceful, blessed
way--a nun of the Order of Providence, for ever.

And what was the fate of Lady Enville?

Just what is generally the fate of women of her type. They pass through
life making themselves vastly comfortable, and those around them vastly
uncomfortable, and then "depart without being desired." They are never
missed--otherwise than as a piece of furniture might be missed. To such
women the whole world is but a platform for the exhibition and
glorification of the Great Me: and the persons in it are units with whom
the Great Me deigns--or does not deign--to associate. Happy are those
few of them who awake, on this side of the dread tribunal, to the
knowledge that in reality this Great Me is a very little me indeed, yet
a soul that can be saved, and that may be lost.

And Rachel?--Ah, Rachel was missed when she went on the inevitable
journey. The house was not the same without her. She had been like a
fresh breeze blowing through it,--perhaps a little sharp at times, but
always wholesome. Those among whom she had dwelt never realised all she
had been to them, nor all the love they had borne to her, until they
could tell her of it no more.

The winter of 1602 had come, and on the ground in Devonshire the snow
lay deep. The trees, thickly planted all round Umberleigh