all. Had her Paradise not been
closed to her, all this talking would have been a thing of course.
But such talking,--such wide-spread knowledge of her condition, with
the gates of her Paradise closed against her, was very hard to bear!
And who had closed the gates? Her own hands had done it. He, her
lover, had not deserted her. He had done for her all that truth and
earnestness demanded, and perhaps as much as love required. Men were
not so soft as girls, she argued within her own breast. Let a man be
ever so true it could not be expected that he should stand by his
love after he had been treated with such cold indifference as had
been shown in her letter! She would have stood by her love, let his
letter have been as cold as it might. But then she was a woman, and
her love, once encouraged, had become a necessity to her. A man, she
said to herself, would be more proud but less stanch. Of course she
would hear no more from him. Of course the gates of her Paradise
were shut. Such were her thoughts as she walked home, and such the
thoughts over which she sat brooding alone throughout the entire day.

At half-past seven in the evening Mrs. Ray came back home, wearily
trudging across the green. She was very weary, for she had now walked
above two miles from the station. She had also been on her feet half
the day, and, which was probably worse than all the rest had she
known it, she had travelled nearly eighty miles by railway. She was
very tired, and would under ordinary circumstances have been disposed
to reckon up her grievances in the evening quite as accurately as
Rachel had reckoned hers in the morning. But something had occurred
in Exeter, the recollection of which still overcame the sense of
weariness which Mrs. Ray felt;--overcame it, or rather overtopped it;
so that when Rachel came out to her at the cottage door she did not
speak at once of her own weariness, but looked lovingly into her
daughter's face,--lovingly and anxiously, and said some little word
intended to denote affection.

"You must be very tired," said Rachel, who, with many self-reproaches
and much communing within her own bosom, had for the time vanquished
her own hard humour.

"Yes, I am tired, my dear; very. I thought the train never would have
got to the Baslehurst station. It stopped at all the little stations,
and really I think I could have walked as fast." A dozen years had
not as yet gone by since the velocity of these trains had been so