“I have her letters also”—­said Ellesborough, almost inaudibly, as he took the book—­“You brought it—­you kind woman!  You were her good angel—­God reward you!”

Then at last a convulsion of weeping showed in Janet’s face.  She laid her hand in his, and went noiselessly away.

Ellesborough sat beside his dead love all night.  The farm was peaceful again after that rush of the Furies through it, which had left this wreck behind.  Rachel’s diary and letter lay before him.  They were as her still living voice in his ears, and as the words sank into memory they pierced through all the rigidities of a noble nature, rending and kneading as they went.  He recalled his own solitary hour of bitterness after her letter reached him.  The story it contained had gone very hard with him, though never for one moment had he even in thought forsaken her.  There was some comfort in that.  But the memory which upheld him, which alone kept him from despair, was the memory of her face at the window, the sense still lingering in his own physical pulses of her young clinging life in his arms, of the fluttering of her poor heart against his breast, the exquisite happiness of her kiss—­the kiss which death cut short.

No—­he had not failed her.  That was all he had to live by.  And without it, it seemed to him, he could not have endured to live.

* * * * *

The two girls had sobbed themselves to sleep at last.  But Janet did not sleep.  Tears came naturally as the hours went by—­tears and the agonized relief of prayer to one for whom prayer was a daily need of the soul.  And in the early morning there flooded in upon her a strange consciousness of Rachel’s spirit in hers—­a strange suspicion that after all the gods had not wrought so hardly with Rachel.  A few days before she had attended the funeral in the village church, of a young wife just happily married, who had died in three days, of virulent influenza.  Never had the words of the Anglican service pleased her so little.  What mockery—­what fulsome mockery—­to thank God because “it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister, out of the miseries of this troublesome world.”  But the words recurred to her now—­mysteriously—­with healing power.  Had it been after all “deliverance” for Rachel, from this “troublesome world,” and the temptations that surround those who are not strong enough for the wrestle that Fate sets them—­that a God appoints them?  She had met her lover—­after fear and anguish; and had known him hers, utterly and wholly hers, for one supreme moment.  And from that height—­that perfection—­God had called her.  No lesser thing could ever touch her now.

Such are the moments of religious exaltation which cheat even the sharpest griefs of men and women.  Janet would decline from her Pisgah height only too soon; but, for the time, thoughts like these gave her the strength to bear.