you've said--the poor creature that you take me for--no
doubt you'd have done better had the chance been yours, but you go too
far----"

"That was unfair of you," Lizzie said very low--"You may say to me what
you please--That's of no importance to anybody. But Francis Breton's
happiness, his success, that is more to me than anything or anyone.--You
_shall_ not break his life into pieces for your own pleasure. There are
more important things than your personal happiness, Lady Seddon----"

They were both standing, but they could not see one another, save, very
faintly, their hands and faces--

"It's too late, Miss Rand," Rachel laughed. "I shall write to him
to-morrow. I myself shall tell my husband--there is nothing that you can
do----"

They stood there, conscious that a word, a movement on either side might
produce an absurd, a tragic scene. Lizzie had never known such anger as
the passion that now held her. Rachel was taunting her with the thing
that she had missed; she stood there, before the world, as the woman for
whom no man cared--she stood there with the one human being who mattered
to her on the edge of complete disaster--nothing that she could do could
prevent it--and the woman at her side was the cause.

A sudden sweeping consciousness of the things that it would mean if
Rachel were dead flowed over her. Her heart stopped--that way--at
least--Francis Breton might be saved....

The room, dark as pitch before her, was filled now with a red glow--Her
hands, clenched, were ice in a world that was all of an overpowering
heat.

Lizzie never afterwards could remember what then exactly happened.

She was worked to a pitch of anger, she was thinking to herself, "What
would be a way? ... anything to save him...."

"She shouldn't have taunted me with that"--when, suddenly, exactly as
though someone had taken her brain and emptied it, she had forgotten
Rachel, had forgotten her own personal injury, forgotten her anger, was
only aware that, with every nerve in her body on edge, she was waiting
for some sound--

Like an answer to an invocation, the sound, through the closed window,
came--

IV

She must have made some startled noise, because she heard Rachel say,
"What is it?"

She fled to the window and opened it. She could see nothing, but she
could hear, as she had known all day that she would hear, steps,
stumbling, falling heavily, upon the heavy gravel path.

She felt Rachel's hand upon her sleeve