o the stillness.
Rachel, driving through the falling dark, felt, as she had felt it when
she was a small child, the august colour and space and dignity of the
first vision of the great house, white as a ghost now under the first
stars, speaking to her with the old voice, fountains that splashed in
gardens, the river that ran at the end of the sloping lawns, the chiming
clock that rang out the hour as she drove up to the door.

Aunt Adela, Uncle John, Dr. Chris, Lizzie, they were all there, and
their presences made less chill the dominating reason for their
assembly.

Over all the house the shadow fell. The wide, high rooms, the long
picture gallery, the comfortless grandeur of a house that had not found,
for some years, many human creatures to lighten it, these echoed and
flung forwards and backwards the note of suspense, of pause, of
impending crisis.

But Rachel spent one of the happiest evenings of her life with Uncle
John and Christopher. She knew that Uncle John had had a short but
terrible interview with her grandmother, that he had been charged with
treachery and dishonour and every traitorous wickedness.

A week ago, when he had told her this, he had been the picture of
despair and shame. "I hadn't meant her to know. She wasn't to come into
it at all. And then that she should meet him at Roddy's on that very
afternoon.... There's nothing bad enough for me." But he had added with
a strange note of defiance so unlike the old Uncle John: "I had felt it
my duty, Rachel ... to speak to Francis. I had felt it the right thing
to do. I had felt it very strongly."

Then he had been overwhelmed, now he was once more at peace, and
tranquil.

"It's all right," he told Rachel. "I've been forgiven. I think she's
forgiven all of us.

"She wouldn't listen when I wanted to tell her how sorry I was. She
seems now not to care."

"She's never forgiven anyone anything before," said

Rachel.

"Hush, my dear, I don't think you ought to say that. We've never
understood her, any of us. She's always been beyond us. You'll realize
to-morrow, Rachel, how wonderful, how _wonderful_ she is!"

But he was very happy. He had his old Rachel back, the old Rachel whom
he had expected never to see again. She sat between him and Christopher,
at dinner, no longer fierce and ironical, with sudden silences and swift
angers, but affectionate, sympathetic, happy.

"Mother will see you to-morrow," Adela told her. "She's glad that you've
c