ottom. It was there
that Rendel, aghast, found her lying unconscious as he hurried out of
his study to see what had happened. The sickening horror of that first
moment, when he believed she was dead, swallowed up every other thought.
It made the time that followed, when Doctor Morgan, instantly sent for,
had pronounced that she had concussion of the brain, from which she
would recover if kept absolutely quiet, a period almost of relief.

And so Rachel was spared the actual moment of the parting she had been
trying to face. For though Sir William rallied again from the crisis
which had so alarmed her, he sank gradually into a state of coma from
which he was destined never to wake, and from which, almost
imperceptibly, he passed during the evening of the next day.

Rendel, tossed on a wild storm of clashing emotions, the great anxiety
caused by Rachel's accident and possible peril added to all he had gone
through, had in truth little actual sorrow to spare for the loss of Sir
William Gore. But Gore's death meant in one direction the death of all
his own remaining hopes. When he knew the end had come, and that he
would have to tell Rachel, when she was able to bear it, that her father
was dead, he then began to realise how, unconsciously to himself almost,
he had built upon some possibility of Sir William doing something to put
things right. What, he had not formulated to himself; but he had had
vague visions of a possible admission of some sort, of an attempted
reconciliation, atonement, confession, such as he had read of in
fiction, by which means the truth would have come out, and he would have
been absolved without any effort on his own part. But those
half-formulated dreams had vanished almost before he had realised them.
Sir William Gore had gone to his eternal rest, and, as far as Rendel
knew, no one but himself knew exactly what had happened. And now there
was nothing in front of him but that miserable blank.

Rachel was not told of what had happened until two days after her
father's funeral. She received the news as though stunned, bewildered;
as if it were too terrible for her to grasp. Gradually she came back to
life again, but she was not the same as before. Her recovery would be,
the doctor explained, a question of time. The accident that had befallen
her, following the great strain and anxiety she had gone through, had
completely upset her nervous system, and appeared--a not uncommon result
after such an ac