nipeg. He offered me a home after
my father died. But he was married, and I didn't get on with his wife. I
dare say it was my fault, but I wasn't happy, and I wanted to get away.
Then a man--an Englishman--bought the next section to us, and we began
to know him. He was a gentleman--he'd been to Cambridge--his father had
some land and a house in Lincolnshire. But he was the third son, and
he'd been taught land agency, he said, as a training for the colonies.
That was all we knew. He was very good-looking, and he began courting me.
I suppose I was proud of his being a University man--a public school boy,
and all that. He told me a lot of stories about his people, and his
money--most of which were lies. But I was a fool--and I believed them. My
brother tried to stop it. Well, you know from his letters what sort of
man he is," and again she brushed the sudden tears away. "But his wife
made mischief, and I was set on having a place of my own. So I stuck to
it--and married him."

She rose abruptly from her seat and began to move restlessly about the
room, taking up a book or her knitting from the table, and putting them
down again, evidently unconscious of what she was doing. Ellesborough
waited. His lean, sharply-cut face revealed a miserable, perhaps an
agonized suspense. This crisis into which she had plunged him so suddenly
was bringing home to him all that he had at stake. That she mattered to
him so vitally he had never known till this moment.

"What's the good of going into it!" she said at last desperately. "You
can guess--what it means"--a sudden crimson rushed to her cheeks--"to
be tied to a man--without honour--or principle--or refinement--who
presently seemed to me vile all through--in what he said--or what he did.
And I was at his mercy. I had married him in such a hurry he had a right
to despise me, and he used it! And when I resisted and turned against
him, then I found out what his temper meant." She raised her shoulders
with a gesture which needed no words. "Well--we got on somehow till my
little girl was born--"

Ellesborough started. Rachel turned on him her sad, swimming eyes. But
the mere mention of her child had given her back her dignity and strength
to go on. She became visibly more composed, as she stood opposite to him,
her beautiful dark head against the sunset clouds outside.

"She only lived a few weeks. Her death was largely owing to him. But
that's a long story. And after her death I couldn't