always knew would happen.'
Don't you know what kind of effect _that_ will have upon him? Don't you
know?... Of course you do. It will break him up. His old life abroad,
creeping from place to place, will begin again, only now he'll have the
additional knowledge that he's done for you as well as for himself. It
will be the end, utterly the end of him. And I, who love him, will not
let it be."

Lizzie's speech had roused in Rachel one of those old storms of anger.
She was exerting now her utmost self-control, but her heart seemed bound
tight with some cord so slender that one movement, one impulse, would
snap it--Then.... She saw in Lizzie now, only moved by a sense of
jealous injury--"She sits there, knowing that I've taken him from her.
That's it.... That's what she's feeling--she's lost him. She can't
forgive me for that."

But when she spoke her voice was quiet and controlled.

"That isn't so," Rachel said; "it won't, I think, be like that. There's
so much more between us than you can understand. There's all our early
life--not that we were together, but we seem to have it all in common,
to have known it all together. We're unlike our family--all the
Beaminsters--we're together in that--we are together in everything."

But Lizzie's voice went on, so coldly, with such assurance that, with
every word, the flame of Rachel's anger climbed a little higher, grew
stronger and steadier.

"There's another thing too. I watched you, more than you know. No, no
man--no man in the world--will ever keep you altogether--there's
something--I can't tell you what it is--there's something in you that
demands more than just a personal relationship like that--Perhaps it's
maternity--it is, with many women,--perhaps it's a great cause, a
movement of a country--

"But I know, with certainty, that you will never love Breton as you
should love a man. Realization will never be the thing to you that
anticipation and retrospection are. I believe if you were to lose your
husband now, you'd find that you loved him--All thoughts of Francis
Breton, would go----"

At that, because at the very heart of her determination burnt
the knowledge that Lizzie's words were true, Rachel's control
was abandoned, her anger leapt: "You think you know--you
think ... why ... why ... you don't know me at all!--you can't know
me--we're strangers, Miss Rand--now--always....

"Nothing, _nothing_ can ever make us friends again--I'll never forgive
you for what