o--and that I should
soon be free to marry him. And, Rachel, you need not feel the least
little bit humiliated, for I shan't tell a soul, and, after all, he
loved me first."

Lady Newhaven was quite reassured. It had been a horrible moment, but it
was past.

"Why do I always make trouble?" she said, with plaintive
self-complacency. "Rachel, you must not be jealous of me. I can't help
it."

Rachel tried to say "I am not," but the words would not come. She _was_
jealous, jealous of the past, cut to the heart every time she noticed
that Lady Newhaven's hair waved over her ears, and that she had taper
fingers.

"I think it is no use talking of this any more," Rachel said. "Perhaps I
was wrong to speak of it at all. I did as I would be done by. As I am
starting early I think I will say good-night and good-bye."

"Good-night, dear Rachel, and perhaps, as you say, it had better be
good-bye. You may remain quite easy in your mind that I shall never
breathe a word of what you have said to any living soul--except Hugh,"
she added to herself, as Rachel left the room.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

"To every coward safety, and afterwards his evil hour."

Sleep, that fickle courtier of our hours of ease, had deserted Hugh.
When the last hour of the last day was over, and the dawn which he had
bound himself in honor not to see found him sitting alone in his room,
where he had sat all night, horror fell upon him at what he had done.
Now that its mire was upon him he saw by how foul, by how dastardly a
path he had escaped.

"To every coward safety, and afterwards his evil hour." Hugh's evil hour
had come. But was he a coward? Men not braver than he have earned the
Victoria Cross, have given up their lives freely for others. Hugh had it
in him to do as well as any man in hot blood, but not in cold. That was
where Lord Newhaven had the advantage of him. He had been overmatched
from the first. The strain without had been greater than the power of
resistance within. As the light grew Hugh tasted of that cup which God
holds to no man's lips--_remorse_. Would the cup of death which he had
pushed aside have been more bitter?

He took up his life like a thief. Was it not stolen? He could not bear
his rooms. He could not bear the crowded streets. He could not bear the
parks. He wandered aimlessly from one to the other, driven out of each
in turn, consumed by the smouldering flame of his self-contempt. Scorn
seemed written on the f