oger Delane.

The brown owl seemed to be shrieking just outside her window. Her
nerves quivered under the sound as though it were her own voice. Why was
life so cruel, so miserable? Why cannot even the gods themselves make
undone what is done? She was none the worse--permanently--for what had
happened in that distant scene--that play within a play? How was she the
worse? She was "not a bad woman!"--as she had said so passionately to
Janet, when they joined hands. There was no lasting taint left in mind
and soul--nothing to prevent her being a pure and faithful wife to George
Ellesborough, and a good mother to his children. It was another Rachel to
whom all that had happened, a Rachel she had a right to forget! She was
weak in will--she had confessed it. But George Ellesborough was strong.
Leaning on him, and on kind Janet, she could be all, she would be all,
that he still dreamed. The past--_that_ past--was dead. It had no
existence. Nothing--neither honour nor love--obliged her to disclose it.
Except in her own mind it was dead and buried--as though it had never
been. No human being shared her knowledge of it, or ever would.

And yet the Accuser came closer and closer, wrestling with her shrinking
heart. "You can't live a lie beside him all your life!" "It won't be a
lie. All that matters to him is what I am now--not what I was. And it
wasn't I!--it was another woman--a miserable, battered creature who
couldn't help herself." "It will rise up between you, and perhaps--after
all--in some way--he will discover it." "How can he? Dick and I--who in
all the world knew, but us two?--and Dick is dead." "Are you sure that no
one knew:--that no one saw you? Think!"

A pale face grew paler in the dim light, as thought hesitated:--

"There was that wagon--and the boy--in the storm." "Yes--what then?"
"Well--what then? The boy scarcely saw me." "He did see you." "And if he
did--it is the commonest thing in a Canadian winter to be caught by a
storm, to ask shelter from a neighbour." "Still--even if he drew no
malicious conclusion, he saw you--alone in that farm with Dick Tanner,
and he probably knew your name." "How should he know my name?" "He had
seen you before--you had seen him before." "I didn't know his name--I
don't know it now." "No--but in passing your farm once, he had dropped a
parcel for a neighbour--and you had seen him once--at a railway station."
"Is it the least likely that I shall ever see him again--or that he