her.

There was a clock on the mantelpiece. "Nearly four o'clock--" she
thought--"I'll give it an hour. He'd send--if he couldn't come, and he
wanted to come--but if nothing happens--I shall know what to think."

As this passed through her mind, she opened one of the drawers of the
dressing-table, in which she kept her gloves and handkerchiefs. Suddenly
she perceived at the back of the drawer a small leathern case. The colour
rushed into her face. She took it out and ran quickly down the stairs to
the kitchen. Janet and the girls were busy milking. The coast was clear.

A bright fire which Janet had just made up was burning in the kitchen.
Rachel went up to it and thrust the leathern case into the red core of
it. Some crackling--a disagreeable smell--and the little thing had soon
vanished. Rachel went slowly upstairs again, and locked the door of her
room behind her. The drawer of the dressing-table was still open, and
there was visible in it the object she was really in search of, when the
little leathern case caught her eye--a small cloth-bound book marked
"Diary."

She took it out, and sat with it in her hand, thinking. How was it she
had never yet destroyed that case? The Greek cameo brooch it held--Dick
Tanner's gift to her--how vividly she recalled her first evening alone at
the farm, when she had dropped it into the old well, and had listened to
the splash of it in the summer silence. She remembered thinking vaguely,
and no doubt foolishly, that the cameo would drop more heavily and more
certainly without the case, which was wood, though covered with leather,
and she had therefore taken the brooch out, and had probably put back the
case absently into her pocket. And thence it had found its way back among
her things, how she did not know.

The little adventure had excited and unnerved her. It seemed somehow of
evil omen that she should have come across that particular thing at this
moment. Opening the diary with a rather trembling hand, she looked
through it. She was not orderly or systematic enough to keep a diary
regularly, and it only contained a few entries, at long intervals,
relating mostly to her married life--and to the death of her child. She
glanced through them with that strange sense of unreality--of standing
already outside her life, of which she had spoken to Janet. There were
some blank pages at the end of the book; and, in her restlessness, just
to pass the time and to find some outlet for the