ep,
Rachel Henderson was sitting up in bed, broad awake, her hands round her
knees. The window beside her was open. She saw the side of the hill and
the bare down in which it ended, with the moonlight bright upon it, and
the dark woods crowning it. There were owls calling from the hill, and
every now and then a light wind rustled through the branches of an oak
that stood in the farm-yard.

She was thinking of what Janet had said about the "Words" of Christ--the
Word of Purity--and the Word of Love. How often she had heard her
father read and expound that chapter! very differently as far as
phraseology--perhaps even as far as meaning--went, yet with all his
heart, like Janet. He was an Anglican clergyman who had done missionary
service in the Canadian West. He had been dead now three years, and her
mother five. She had bitterly missed them both when she was in her worst
need; yet now she was thankful they had died--before--

What would her father think of her now? Would he grant that she was free,
or would he still hold to those rigid, those cruel views of his? Oh, he
must grant it! She _was_ free! Her breast shook with the fervour of her
protest. She had been through passion and wrong, through things that
seared and defiled. She knew well that she had been no mere innocent
sufferer. Yet now she had her life before her again; and both heart and
senses were hungry for the happiness she had so abominably missed. And
her starved conscience--that, too, was eagerly awake. She had her
self-respect to recover--the past to forget.

_Work_! that was the receipt--hard work! And this dear woman, Janet
Leighton, to help her; Janet, with her pure, modest life and her high
aims. So, at last, clinging to the thought of her new friend like a
wearied child, Rachel Henderson fell asleep.

III

"A jolly view!"

Janet assented. She was sitting behind the pony, while Rachel had walked
up the hill beside the carriage, to the high point where both she and the
pony--a lethargic specimen of the race--had paused to take breath.

They were on a ridge whence there was a broad bit of the world to see. To
the north, a plain rich in all the diversities of English land--field and
wood, hamlet and church, the rising grounds and shallow depressions, the
small enclosures and the hedgerow timber, that make all the difference
between the English midlands and, say, the plain of Champagne, or a
Russian steppe. Across the wide, many-coloured sc