A bright fire which Janet had just made up was burning in the kitchen.  Rachel went up to it and thrust the leathern case into the red core of it.  Some crackling—­a disagreeable smell—­and the little thing had soon vanished.  Rachel went slowly upstairs again, and locked the door of her room behind her.  The drawer of the dressing-table was still open, and there was visible in it the object she was really in search of, when the little leathern case caught her eye—­a small cloth-bound book marked “Diary.”

She took it out, and sat with it in her hand, thinking.  How was it she had never yet destroyed that case?  The Greek cameo brooch it held—­Dick Tanner’s gift to her—­how vividly she recalled her first evening alone at the farm, when she had dropped it into the old well, and had listened to the splash of it in the summer silence.  She remembered thinking vaguely, and no doubt foolishly, that the cameo would drop more heavily and more certainly without the case, which was wood, though covered with leather, and she had therefore taken the brooch out, and had probably put back the case absently into her pocket.  And thence it had found its way back among her things, how she did not know.

The little adventure had excited and unnerved her.  It seemed somehow of evil omen that she should have come across that particular thing at this moment.  Opening the diary with a rather trembling hand, she looked through it.  She was not orderly or systematic enough to keep a diary regularly, and it only contained a few entries, at long intervals, relating mostly to her married life—­and to the death of her child.  She glanced through them with that strange sense of unreality—­of standing already outside her life, of which she had spoken to Janet.  There were some blank pages at the end of the book; and, in her restlessness, just to pass the time and to find some outlet for the storm of feeling within, she began to write, at first slowly, and then very rapidly.

“He must have got my letter by now.  I sent it by Janet this morning.  He wasn’t there—­but by now he must have got home—­he is probably reading it at this moment.  Whatever happens to me—­I want just to say this—­to write it down now, while I can—­I shall never blame George, and I shall always love him—­with all my heart, with all my soul.  He has the right to say he can’t trust me—­I told him so in my letter this morning—­that I am not fit to be his wife.  He has the right—­and very likely he will say it.  The terrible thing is that I don’t trust myself.  If I look forward and ask myself—­shall I always feel as I do now?—­I can’t honestly be sure.  There is something in me that wants change—­always something new—­some fresh experience.  I can’t even imagine the time when I shouldn’t love George.  The mere thought of losing him is awful—­unspeakable.  But yet—­I will write it down frankly!—­nothing has ever lasted with me very long.  It is like the farm.  I used to love every minute of the day, every bit of the work, however dull and dirty it was; and now—­I love it still—­but I seem already—­sometimes—­to be looking forward to the day when I shall be tired of it.