When the house began to move again, she went down to Ellesborough.  She drew him into the kitchen—­made a fire, and brought him food.  Presently she found calm enough to tell him many details of the previous days.  And the man’s sound nature responded.  Once he grasped her hand, and kissed it—­as though he thanked her dumbly again, for himself and Rachel.  It seemed to Janet indeed, as she sat by him, that Rachel had left her a trust.  She took it up instinctively—­from this first desolate morning.  For there are women set apart for friendship—­Janet was one of them—­as others are set apart for love.

* * * * *

And with the first break of light on the new November day, the search parties in the hills came upon what they sought.  Some one remembered the deserted hut—­and from that moment the hunt was easy.  Finally in the dripping heart of the wood the pursuers found the murderer lying face downwards in front of the dead fire, with the revolver beside him with which he had taken first Rachel’s life, and then his own.  Some sheets of paper were scattered near him, on which he had written an incoherent and grandiloquent confession.  But of such acts there is no real explanation.  They are the product of that black seed in human nature which is born with a man, and flowers in due time, through devious stages, into such a deed as that which destroyed Rachel Henderson.