“Ain’t she just kind?—­don’t you just love her?” said Jenny ecstatically to Betty, as they turned back to wave their farewells again to the figure standing in the doorway.

Betty assented.  But they were both greatly astonished.  For Rachel did not in general take much personal notice of them.

They were no sooner out of sight than Rachel went to look at the clock in the kitchen.  Ten minutes to seven.  Two hours to wait.  How were they going to be got through?

She went out aimlessly into the farm-yard, where the farm buildings stood in a faintly luminous mist, the hill-side behind them, and the climbing woods.  To her left, across the fields ran the road climbing to the miniature pass, whence it descended steeply to the plain beyond.  And on the further side of the road lay her own fields, with alternating bands of plough-land and stubble, and the hedge-row trees standing ghostly and separate in the light haze.

She was alone in the farm, in all that landscape the only living thing at the moment, except for the animals.  A tense energy of will seemed to possess her.  She was defending herself—­defending Ellesborough—­and their joint lives.  How was she going to do it?  She didn’t know.  But the passion in her blood would give her strength—­would see her through.

In the old barn, the cows were munching peacefully.  The air was sweet with their breath, and with the hay piled in their cribs.  Rachel wandered noiselessly amongst them, and they turned their large eyes slowly to look at her, and the small lantern she carried.  In the stables, too, not a sound, but an occasional swishing and champing.  Rachel hung up the lantern, and sat down on a truss of hay, idly watching the rays of light striking up into the cross-beams of the roof, and on the shining flanks of the horses.  Her mind was going at a great speed.  And all in a moment—­without any clear consciousness of the strange thoughts that had been running through her brain—­an intuition struck through her.

Roger!—­it was he who had been playing the ghost—­he who had been seen haunting the farm—­who had scared Halsey—­Roger! come to spy upon her and her lover!  Once the idea suggested itself, she was certain of it—­it must be true.

The appearance in the lane had been cleverly premeditated.  She had been watched for days, perhaps for weeks.

Ellesborough had been watched, too, no doubt.

She drew a shuddering breath.  She was afraid of Roger Delane.  From the early days of her marriage she had been afraid of him.  There was about him the incalculable something which means moral insanity—­abnormal processes of mind working through uncontrolled will.  You could never reason with or influence him, where his appetites or his passions were concerned.  A mocking spirit looked out upon you, just before his blow fell.  He was a mere force—­inhuman and sinister.