“Perhaps we may as well keep that here, after all,” said Rachel, indicating Athelsan’s water-colour.  Her voice was soft.  She remembered that the name of Mrs. Maldon, only a little while since a major notability of Bursley and the very mirror of virtuous renown, had been mentioned but once, and even then apologetically, during the afternoon.

Louis asked, sharply—­

“Why, if you don’t care for it? I don’t.”

“Well—­” said Rachel.  “As you like, then, dearest.”

Louis walked out of the room with the water-colour, and in a moment returned with a photogravure of Lord Leighton’s “The Garden of the Hesperides,” in a coquettish gold frame—­a gift newly arrived from Louis’ connections in the United States.  The marmoreal and academic work seemed wonderfully warm and original in that room at Bycars.  Rachel really admired it, and admired herself for admiring it.  But when Louis had hung it and flicked it into exact perpendicularity, and they had both exclaimed upon its brilliant effect even in the dusk, Rachel saw it also with the eyes of Mrs. Maldon, and wondered what Mrs. Maldon would have thought of it opposite her bed, and knew what Mrs. Maldon would have thought of it.

And then, the job being done and the progress of civilization assured, Louis murmured in a new appealing voice—­

“I say, Louise!”

“Louise” was perhaps his most happy invention, and the best proof that Louis was Louis.  Upon hearing that her full Christian names were Rachel Louisa, he had instantly said—­“I shall call you Louise.”  Rachel was ravished, Louisa is a vulgar name—­at least it is vulgar in the Five Towns, where every second general servant bears it.  But Louise was full of romance, distinction, and beauty.  And it was the perfect complement to Louis.  Louis and Louise—­ideal coincidence!  “But nobody except me is to call you Louise,” he had added.  And thus completed her bliss.

“What?” she encouraged him amorously.

“Suppose we go to Llandudno on Saturday for the week-end?”

His tone was gay, gentle, innocent, persuasive.  Yet the words stabbed her and her head swam.

“But why?” she asked, controlling her utterance.

“Oh, well!  Be rather a lark, wouldn’t it?” It was when he talked in this strain that the inconvenient voice of sagacity within her would question for one agonizing instant whether she was more secure as the proud, splendid wife of Louis Fores than she had been as a mere lady help.  And the same insistent voice would repeat the warnings which she had had from Mrs. Maldon and from Thomas Batchgrew, and would remind her of what she herself had said to herself when Louis first kissed her—­“This is wrong.  But I don’t care.  He is mine.”