r on when you are feeling stronger. You are evidently tired
out now. Everything looks exaggerated when we are exhausted, as I see
you are."

"I am worn out with misery," said Lady Newhaven. "I have not slept for a
fortnight. I feel I must tell some one." And she burst into violent
weeping.

Rachel sat down again, and waited patiently for the hysterical weeping
to cease. Those in whom others confide early learn that their own
engagements, their own pleasures and troubles, are liable to be set
aside at any moment. Rachel was a punctual, exact person, but she missed
many trains. Those who sought her seldom realized that her day was as
full as, possibly fuller, than their own. Perhaps it was only a very
small pleasure to which she had been on her way on this particular
morning, and for which she had put on that ethereal gray gown for the
first time. At any rate, she relinquished it without a second thought.

Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes and turned impulsively towards
her.

The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so
mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to
guess which would come uppermost. Sometimes fragments of both appeared
on the surface together.

"I loved you from the first moment I saw you," she said. "I don't take
fancies to people, you know. I am not that kind of person. I am very
difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns myself. I am
_most_ reserved. I dare say you have noticed how reserved I am. I live
in my shell. But directly I saw you I felt I could talk to you. I said
to myself, 'I will make a friend of that girl.' Although I always feel a
married woman is so differently placed from a girl. A girl only thinks
of herself. I am not saying this the least unkindly, but, of course, it
is so. Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all
she says and does. How will it affect _them?_ That is what I so often
say to myself, and then my lips are sealed. But, of course, being
unmarried, you would not understand that feeling."

Rachel did not answer. She was inured to this time-honored
conversational opening.

"And the temptations of married life," continued Lady Newhaven--"a girl
cannot enter into them."

"Then do not tell me about them," said Rachel, smiling, wondering if she
might still escape. But Lady Newhaven had no intention of letting her
go. She only wished to indicate to her her true position. And gradua