ldn't take things as they were.

Perhaps during these last weeks he had himself felt that all was not
well. Rachel thought that sometimes now through, all his kindness she
detected a floating, wistful speculation on his part as to whether she
were happy.

He _wanted_ her to be happy--most tremendously he wanted it--and did she
explain to him that she was not happy because she was, now, for ever
attended by a sense of her own disloyalty to all that was best in her,
he would have suggested a doctor or have made her a present.

Had she been some stranger and had the case been presented to him he
would have probably dismissed it by saying that "having made her bed she
must lie on it." "After all, she married the feller--Well then, that's
_her_ look-out."

So, perhaps, if this had been simply her trouble she would have done her
bravest best to endeavour.

But there was more behind it all--far, far more.

She saw her marriage to Roddy, her struggling for self-respect, her
present morbid introspection as a stage in what was now developing into
a duel between herself and her grandmother.

Her grandmother had planned this marriage. Her grandmother was
determined to destroy the honesty and truth in her and had chosen a
Beaminster for her agent and now waited happy for the death of Rachel's
soul.

But Rachel's soul should not so readily die! During all these weeks the
thought of her grandmother had been continually with her. How she hated
her, and with what fervour did Rachel return that hatred!

There was no melodrama in this hatred. When she had been a very little
girl Rachel had somehow believed that her grandmother had been very
cruel to her mother and father--She had hated her for that. Then she had
seen that her grandmother disliked her and wished to tease her--so she
had hated her for that also.

Her older amplification of this into principles and instincts had not
altered the original vehemence of the passion, it had only given it
grown-up reasons for its existence.

And so, thinking of her grandmother, she thought also of Francis Breton.

Some weeks ago she had received a letter from him and that letter was
now lying in the desk of her writing-table.

She had thought that her marriage would have snapped her interest in her
cousin because it would have broken that hostility with her grandmother
upon which her relationship with her cousin so largely depended. But now
when she saw that marriage had only inten