lly closed the stable
shutter, and ran back across the yard into the shelter of the house,
locking the front door behind her, and going into the sitting-room and
the kitchen, to see that the windows were fastened.

Janet was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. They kissed each
other gravely, in silence, like those who feel that the time for speech
is done. Then Rachel went into her room, and Janet heard her turn the
key. Janet herself slept intermittently. But whenever she woke, it seemed
to her that there was some slight sound in the next room--a movement or
a rustle, which showed that Rachel was still awake--and up?

It was a night indeed which left Rachel with that sense of strange
illuminations, of life painfully enlarged and deepened, which love and
suffering may always bring to the woman who is capable of love and
suffering. She had spent the hours in writing to Ellesborough, and in
that letter she had unpacked her heart to its depths, Janet guessed. When
she received the letter from Rachel on the morrow, she handled it as a
sacred thing.

XV

The frost held. A sun of pearl and fire rose over the hill, as the stars
finally faded out in the winter morning, and a brilliant rime lay
sparkling on all the pastures and on the slopes of the down. The
brilliance had partly vanished from the lower grounds when Janet started
on her way; but on the high commons, winter was at its gayest and
loveliest. The distant woods were a mist of brown and azure, encircling
the broad frost-whitened spaces; the great single beeches and oaks under
which Spenser or Sidney--the great Will himself--might have walked, shot
up, magnificent, into a clear sky, proudly sheltering the gnarled thorns
and furze-bushes which marched beside and round them, like dwarfs in a
pageant.

Half way up the hill, Janet came across old Betts bringing down a small
cart-full of furze for fodder, and she stopped to speak to him. A little
later on, nearer to the camp she overtook Dempsey, who rather officiously
joined her, and assuming at once that she was in quest of the Camp
Commandant, directed her to a short cut leading straight to
Ellesborough's quarters. There was a slight something in the manner of
both men that jarred on Janet--as though their lips said one thing and
their eyes another--furtive in the case of Betts, a trifle insolent
in that of Dempsey. She with her tragic knowledge guessed uncomfortably
at what it meant. Dempsey--as she