But her resolve remained unshaken.  It might hurt her to take his personal gifts, but that was all she had ever had from him; he had never granted her a set allowance; for every penny she must needs ask and look grateful.  It would be no fault of hers if she had to strip her fingers for passage-money.  Yet the exigency troubled her; it touched her honor, to say nothing of her pride; and, after an unforeseen fit of irresolution, Rachel suddenly determined to tell her husband of her difficulty, making direct appeal to the capricious generosity which had been recalled to her mind as an undeniably redeeming point.  It was true that he had given her hearty leave to go to the uttermost ends of the earth, and highly probable that he would bid her work her own way.  She felt an impulse to put it to him, however, and at once.

She looked at her watch—­it at least had been her mother’s—­and the final day was already an hour old.  But Alexander Minchin was a late sitter, as his young wife knew to her cost, and to-night he had told her where he meant to sleep, but she had not heard him come up.  The room would have been the back drawing-room in the majority of such houses, and Rachel peeped in on her way down.  It was empty; moreover, the bed was not made, nor the curtains drawn.  Rachel repaired the first omission, then hesitated, finally creeping upstairs again for clean sheets.  And as she made his bed, not out of any lingering love for him, but from a sense of duty and some consideration for his comfort, there was yet something touching in her instinctive care, that breathed the wife she could have been.

He did not hear her, though the stairs creaked the smallness of the hour—­or if he heard he made no sign.  This discouraged Rachel as she stole down the lower flight; she would have preferred the angriest sign.  But there were few internal sounds which penetrated to the little study at the back of the dining-room, for the permanent tenant was the widow of an eminent professor lately deceased, and that student had protected his quiet with double doors.  The outer one, in dark red baize, made an alarming noise as Rachel pulled it open; but, though she waited, no sound came from within; nor was Minchin disturbed by the final entry of his wife, whose first glance convinced her of the cause.  In the professor’s armchair sat his unworthy successor, chin on waistcoat, a newspaper across his knees, an empty decanter at one elbow.  Something remained in the glass beside the bottle; he had tumbled off before the end.  There were even signs of deliberate preparations for slumber, for the shade was tilted over the electric light by which he had been reading, as a hat is tilted over the eyes.

Rachel had a touch of pity at seeing him in a chair for the night; but the testimony of the decanter forbade remorse.  She had filled it herself in the evening against her husband’s return from an absence of mysterious length.  Now she understood that mystery, and her face darkened as she recalled the inconceivable insult which his explanation had embraced.  No, indeed; not another minute that she could help!  And he would sleep there till all hours of the morning; he had done it before; the longer the better, this time.