s spoken between them, and in the same
silence they sat till bed-time. To Mrs. Ray and to Rachel it had
been one of the saddest, dreariest days that either of them had ever
known. I doubt whether the suffering of Mrs. Prime was so great. She
was kept up by the excitement of feeling that some great crisis was
at hand. If Rachel were not made amenable to authority she would
leave the cottage.

When Rachel had run with hurrying steps from the stile in the
churchyard, she left Luke Rowan still standing there. He watched her
till she crossed into the lane, and then he turned and again looked
out upon the still ruddy line of the horizon. The blaze of light was
gone, but there were left, high up in the heavens, those wonderful
hues which tinge with softly-changing colour the edges of the clouds
when the brightness of some glorious sunset has passed away. He sat
himself on the wooden rail, watching till all of it should be over,
and thinking, with lazy half-formed thoughts, of Rachel Ray. He did
not ask himself what he meant by assuring her of his friendship,
and by claiming hers, but he declared to himself that she was very
lovely,--more lovely than beautiful, and then smiled inwardly at the
prettiness of her perturbed spirit. He remembered well that he had
called her Rachel, and that she had allowed his doing so to pass
by without notice; but he understood also how and why she had done
so. He knew that she had been flurried, and that she had skipped
the thing because she had not known the moment at which to make her
stand. He gave himself credit for no undue triumph, nor her discredit
for any undue easiness. "What a woman she is!" he said to himself;
"so womanly in everything." Then his mind rambled away to other
subjects, possibly to the practicability of making good beer instead
of bad.

He was a young man, by no means of a bad sort, meaning to do well,
with high hopes in life, one who had never wronged a woman, or been
untrue to a friend, full of energy and hope and pride. But he was
conceited, prone to sarcasm, sometimes cynical, and perhaps sometimes
affected. It may be that he was not altogether devoid of that Byronic
weakness which was so much more prevalent among young men twenty
years since than it is now. His two trades had been those of an
attorney and a brewer, and yet he dabbled in romance, and probably
wrote poetry in his bedroom. Nevertheless, there were worse young men
about Baslehurst than Luke Rowan.

"