Well, she had got to fight it and tame it!  She shut up the cow-house and stable, and stood out awhile in the farm-yard, letting the mild wind play on her bare head and hot cheeks.  The moon was riding overhead.  The night seemed to her very silent and mysterious—­yet penetrated by something divine to which she lifted her heart.  What would Ellesborough say over there—­in his forester’s hut, five miles beyond the hills, if he knew what she was doing—­whom she was expecting?  She shut her eyes, and saw his lean, strong face, his look—­

The church clock was striking, and surely—­in the distance, the sound of an opening gate?  She hurried back to the house, and the sitting-room.  The lamp was low.  She revived it.  She made up the fire.  She felt herself shivering with excitement, and she stooped over the fire, warming her hands.

She had purposely left the front door unlocked.  A hand tried the handle, turned it—­a slow step entered.

She went to the sitting-room door and threw it open—­

“Come in here.”

Roger Delane came in and shut the door behind him.  They confronted each other.

“You’ve managed it uncommonly well,” he said, at last.  “You’ve dared it.  Aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Not the least.  What do you want?”

They surveyed each other—­with hatred, yet not without a certain passionate curiosity on both sides.  When Delane had last seen Rachel she was a pale and care-worn creature, her youth darkened by suffering and struggle, her eyes still heavy with the tears she had shed for her lost baby.  He beheld her now rounded and full-blown, at the zenith of her beauty, and breathing an energy, physical and mental, he had never yet seen in her.  She had escaped him, and her life had put out a new flower.  He was suddenly possessed as he looked at her, both by the poisonous memory of old desire, and by an intolerable sense of his impotence, and her triumph.  And the physical fever in his veins made self-control difficult.

On her side, she saw the ruin of a man.  When she married him he had been a moral wreck.  But the physical envelope was still intact, still splendid.  Now his clothes seemed to hang upon a skeleton; the hollows in the temples and cheeks, the emaciation of the face and neck, the scanty grey hair, struck horror, but it was a horror in which there was not a trace of sympathy or pity.  He had destroyed himself, and he would, if he could, destroy her.  She read in him the thirst for revenge.  She had to baffle it, if she could.

As she defied him, indeed, she saw his hand steal to his coat-pocket, and it occurred to her that the pocket might contain a revolver.  But the thought only nerved her—­gave her an almost exultant courage.

“What do I want?” he repeated, at last with-drawing his eyes.  “I’ll tell you.  I’ve come—­like Foch—­to dictate to you certain terms, which you have only to accept.  We had better sit down.  It will take time.”