you away."

"I always thought he was in Canada?" said Janet, in bewilderment. "What
did he want? Have you told Captain Ellesborough?"

"No, I haven't told George. I don't know whether I shall. Roger wanted
money--as usual. I gave him some."

"_You gave him some! Rachel!_"

"I had to--I had to buy him off. And I've seen John Dempsey also without
your knowing. And I've had to bribe him too."

Rachel was now sitting up, very hard and erect, her hands round her
knees. Her first object seemed to be to avoid emotion, and to prevent
Janet from showing any. Janet had gone very pale. The name "Dick Tanner"
was drumming in her ear.

"I know you can't understand me, Janet," said Rachel, after a pause, "you
could never do what I've done. I dare say when you've let me tell you the
story you'll not be able to forgive me. You'll think I ought never to
have let you settle with me--that I told a lie when I said I wasn't a bad
woman--that I've disgraced you. I hope you won't. That--that would about
finish it." Her voice shook at last.

Janet was speechless. But instinctively she laid a hand on Rachel's
shoulder. And at the touch, in a moment, the story came out.

Confused and hardly intelligible! For Rachel herself could scarcely now
disentangle all the threads and motives of it. But certain things stood
out--the figure of a young artist, sensitive, pure-minded, sincere, with
certain fatal weaknesses of judgment and will, which had made him a
rolling stone, and the despair of his best friends, but, as compared with
Roger Delane after six months of marriage--Hyperion to a satyr; then the
attraction of such a man for his neighbour, a young wife, brought up in a
refined home, the child of a saint and dreamer, outraged since her
marriage in every fibre by the conduct and ways of her husband, and
smarting under the sense of her own folly; their friendship, so
blameless till its last moment, with nothing to hide, and little to
regret, a woman's only refuge indeed from hours of degradation and
misery; and finally the triumph of something which was not passion, at
least on Rachel's side, but of mere opportunity, strengthened, made
irresistible, by the woman's pain and despair: so the tale, the common
tale, ran.

"I didn't love him," said Rachel at last, her hands over her eyes--"I
don't pretend I did. I liked him--I was awfully sorry for him--as he was
for me. But--well, there it is! I went over to his house. I honestly
thought his s