h was accidental.

But it could not be his duty to set them right, to rake up the whole
hideous story again.

By an extraordinary, by a miraculous chance, he was saved, as it were, a
second time. It could do no good to allude to the dreadful subject
again. Besides, he had promised Rachel never to speak of it again.

He groaned, and hid his face in his hands.

"Oh, coward and wretch that I am," he said. "Cannot I even be honest
with myself? I lied to her to-day. I never thought I could have told
Rachel a lie, but I did. I can't live without her. I must have her. I
would rather die than lose her now. And I should have lost her if I'd
told her the truth. I felt that. I am not worthy. It was an ill day for
her when she took my tarnished life into her white hands. She ought to
have trodden me under foot. But she does love me, and I will never
deceive her again. She does love me, and, God helping me, I will make
her happy."

The strain of conflict was upon Hugh--the old, old conflict of the seed
with the earth, of the soul with love. How many little fibres and roots
the seed puts out, pushed by an unrecognized need within itself, not
without pain, not without a gradual rending of its being, not without a
death unto self into a higher life. Love was dealing with Hugh's soul as
the earth deals with the seed, and--he suffered.

It was a man who did not look like an accepted lover who presented
himself at Rachel's door the following afternoon.

But Rachel was not there. Her secretary handed Hugh a little note which
she had left for him, telling him that Hester had suddenly fallen ill,
and that she had been sent for to Southminster. The note ended: "These
first quiet days are past. So now you may tell your mother, and put our
engagement in the _Morning Post_."

Hugh was astonished at the despair which overwhelmed him at the bare
thought that he should not see Rachel that day and not the next either.
It was not to be borne. She had no right to make him suffer like this.
Day by day, when a certain restless fever returned upon him, he had
known, as an opium-eater knows, that at a certain hour he should become
rested and calm and sane once more. To be in the same room with Rachel,
to hear her voice, to let his eyes dwell upon her, to lean his forehead
for a moment against her hand, was to enter, as we enter in dreams, a
world of joy and comfort, and boundless, endless, all-pervading peace.

And now he was suddenly left shive