Confused and hardly intelligible!  For Rachel herself could scarcely now disentangle all the threads and motives of it.  But certain things stood out—­the figure of a young artist, sensitive, pure-minded, sincere, with certain fatal weaknesses of judgment and will, which had made him a rolling stone, and the despair of his best friends, but, as compared with Roger Delane after six months of marriage—­Hyperion to a satyr; then the attraction of such a man for his neighbour, a young wife, brought up in a refined home, the child of a saint and dreamer, outraged since her marriage in every fibre by the conduct and ways of her husband, and smarting under the sense of her own folly; their friendship, so blameless till its last moment, with nothing to hide, and little to regret, a woman’s only refuge indeed from hours of degradation and misery; and finally the triumph of something which was not passion, at least on Rachel’s side, but of mere opportunity, strengthened, made irresistible, by the woman’s pain and despair:  so the tale, the common tale, ran.

“I didn’t love him,” said Rachel at last, her hands over her eyes—­“I don’t pretend I did.  I liked him—­I was awfully sorry for him—­as he was for me.  But—­well, there it is!  I went over to his house.  I honestly thought his sister was there; but, above all, I wanted him to sympathize with me—­and pity me—­because he knew everything.  And she wasn’t there—­and I stayed three days and nights with him. Voila!”

There was silence a little.  Janet’s thoughts were in a tumult.  Rachel began again: 

“Now, why am I telling you all this?  I need never have told anybody—­at least up to a few days ago.  Poor Dick was drowned just before I got my divorce, in a boat accident on Lake Nipissing.  He had gone there to paint, and was camping out.  If he hadn’t been drowned, perhaps, he would have made me marry him.  So there was no one in the world who knew I was ever with him except—­”

She turned sharply upon Janet—­

“Except this man who turned up here in George’s own camp—­and in the village, two months ago, but whom I never saw till this week—­this week—­Armistice Day—­John Dempsey.  That was a queer chance, wasn’t it?  The sort of thing nobody could have expected.  I was coming back from Millsborough.  I was—­well, just that evening, I was awfully happy.  I expected nothing.  And then—­within twenty minutes—­”

She told the story to Janet’s astounded ears, of the two apparitions in the road, of her two interviews—­first with Dempsey, and the following evening with Delane—­and of her own attempts to bribe them both.

And at that her composure broke down.