Anthony Dexter, in the doctor’s carriage, was travelling at a leisurely pace.  As he passed the old house, he glanced at it mechanically, from sheer force of habit.  Long ago, it had ceased to have any definite meaning for him.  Once he had even stripped every white rose from the neglected bush at the gate, to take to his wife, who, that day, for the first time, had held their son in her arms.

Motionless in the wreck of the garden, a veiled figure stood with averted face.  Doctor Dexter looked keenly for an instant in the fast gathering twilight, then whipped up his horse, and was swiftly out of sight.  Against his better judgment, he was shaken in mind and body.  Could he have seen a ghost?  Nonsense!  He was tired, he had overworked, he had had an hallucination.  His cool, calm, professional sense fought with the insistent idea.  It was well that Ralph was coming to relieve his old father of a part of his burden.

Meanwhile, Miss Evelina, her frail body quivering as though under the lash, crept back into the house.  With the sure intuition of a woman, she knew who had driven by in the first darkness.  That he should dare!  That he should actually trespass upon her road; take the insolent liberty of looking at her house!

“A pretty young wife,” Miss Hitty had said.  Yes, doubtless a pretty one.  Anthony Dexter delighted in the beauty of a woman in the same impersonal way that another man would regard a picture.  And a son.  A straight, tall young fellow, doubtless, with eyes like his father’s—­eyes that a woman would trust, not dreaming of the false heart and craven soul.  Why had she been brought here to suffer this last insult, this last humiliation?  Weakly, as many a woman before her, Miss Evelina groped in the maze of Life, searching for some clue to its blind mystery.

Was it possible that she had not suffered enough?  If five-and-twenty years of sodden misery were not sufficient for one who had done no wrong, what punishment would be meted out to a sinner by a God who was always kind?  Miss Evelina’s lips curled scornfully.  She had taken what he should have borne—­Anthony Dexter had gone scot free.

“The man sins and the woman pays.”  The cynical saying, which, after all, is not wholly untrue, took shape in her thought and said itself—­aloud.  Yet it was not altogether impossible that he might yet be made to pay—­could be—­

Her cheeks burned and her hands closed tightly.  What if she were the chosen instrument?  What if she had been sent here, after all the dead, miserable years, for some purpose which hitherto she had not guessed?

What if she, herself, with her veiled face, were to be the tardy avenger of her own wrong?  Her soul stirred in its despair as the dead might stir in the winding sheet.  Out of her sodden grief, could she ever emerge—­alive?

“The fire was kind,” said Miss Evelina, in a whisper.  “It showed me the truth.  The fire was kind and God is kind.  He has brought me here to pay my debt—­in full.”