all.

Sometimes when the grass, was very green, when high white clouds piled
one upon another hung above the pond whose corner he could just see,
thoughts of his little grey house, his gardens, the Downs, his horses
and dogs would come to him--

"Come out! Come out!" a sparrow would dance on his window ledge--

"Damn you, I can't!" he would cry and then his eyes would fly to
Rachel's photograph--"If I get her it will be worth it, won't it, Jacob,
my son?"

He talked continually to Jacob and found great comfort in the stolid
assurance with which the dog would wag his stump of a tail--"He's more
than human, that dog," he would tell Rachel; "funny how I never used to
see anything in him."

Of course there were many days when life was utterly impossible; then he
would snap at everyone, lie scowling at the park, curse his impotence,
his miserable degraded infirmities. "Curse it, to die in a ditch like
this--to be broken up, to be smashed...."

His majestic butler--now the tenderest and most devoted of
attendants--stood these evil days with great equanimity.

"Bless you, of course he's bound to be wild now and again--wonder is it
don't happen more often--It does him good to curse a bit."

So things were with him until the day of the Duchess's visit. His
surprise at seeing her was confused with an assurance that "she had come
for something." After her departure what she had come for was plain
enough to see.

He had not taken her words about Breton at first with any credulity. His
principal emotion at the time had been anger with the old woman, a great
desire that she should go before he should forget himself and be
disgraced by showing temper to anyone so old and feeble--But when she
had gone, he found that peace had left him now once and for all.

He knew that the Duchess hated Rachel and he was ready to allow for the
bias and exaggeration that spite would lend, but, when that was taken
away, much remained.

Rachel knew Breton, that was certain; she had never told him. Breton's
name had occurred sometimes in conversation and she had always spoken of
him as though he were a complete stranger. Rachel knew Breton and she
had never told him....

He might tell himself that she had not told him because she knew that he
would instantly stop the acquaintance--It was, of course, simply a
friendship that had sprung up because Rachel was sorry for his
ostracism. Roddy thought that that was just like Rachel, part of her