was engaged to Captain Ellesborough, and all that.  But that was no reason why she should carry off Jenny’s “friend,” as well as her own.  Jenny’s heart swelled within her as she watched Miss Henderson from the other end of the table.  Yes, of course, she was nice-looking, and her clothes were nice.  Jenny thought that she would get a new best dress soon, now that peace was come; and a new hat with a high silk crown to match the dress.  Dempsey had admired a hat like that on a girl in the village.  He had said it was “real smart.”  And to be “smart” Jenny thought was to be happy.

After supper, Janet and the girls washed up and put all tidy for the night.  Rachel worked at accounts in the sitting-room.  She had sold the last hay she had to spare wonderfully well, and potatoes showed a good profit.  Threshing charges were very high, and wages—­appalling!  But on the whole, they were doing very well.  Janet’s Jersey cow had been expensive, but they could afford her.

They had never yet drawn out so good an interim balance sheet without delight, and rosy dreams for the future.  Now her mood was leaden, and she pushed the papers aside impatiently.  As she was sitting with her hands round her knees, staring into the fire, or at the chair where Ellesborough had sat while she told her story, Janet came into the room.  She paused at the door, and Rachel did not see her look of sudden alarm as she perceived Rachel’s attitude of depression.  Then she came up to the fire.  The two girls could be heard laughing overhead.

“So my cow’s a good one?” she said, with her pleasant voice and smile.

“A beauty,” said Rachel, looking up, and recapitulating the points and yield of the Jersey.

Janet gave a shrug—­implying a proper scepticism.

“It doesn’t seem to be quite as easy to tell lies about cows as about horses,” she said, laughing; “that’s about all one can say.  We’ll hope for the best.”  Then—­after a moment,—­

“I never told you much about that man Dempsey’s visit.  Of course he came to see you.  He thought when he saw you at Millsborough that you were a Mrs. Delane he had seen in Canada.  Were you perhaps a relation of hers?  I said I would ask you.  Then I inquired how often he had seen Mrs. Delane.  He said twice—­perhaps three times—­at her home—­at a railway station—­and at a farm belonging to a man called Tanner.”

“Yes,” said Rachel, indifferently.  “I knew Lucy Tanner, his sister.  She was an artist like him.  I liked them both.”

There was silence.  In Rachel’s breast there was beating a painful tide of speech that longed to find its way to freedom—­but it was gripped and thrust back by her will.  There was something in Janet as in Ellesborough that wooed her heart, that seemed to promise help.

But nothing more passed, of importance.  Janet, possessed by vague, yet, as they seemed to herself, quite unreasonable anxieties, gave some further scornful account of Dempsey’s murder talk, to which Rachel scarcely listened; then she said, as she turned to take up her knitting,—­