“I’ll try and tell it shortly.  It’s a horrible tale.”

“Do you feel able to tell it?”

For he was aghast at her pallor—­the alteration in her whole aspect.

“I must,” she wailed.  “Weren’t you—­weren’t you just going to ask me to marry you?”

Strange question!—­strange frowning eyes!

“I was,” he said gravely.  “Didn’t you know I should?”

“No, no, I didn’t know!” she said piteously.  “I was never sure—­till you looked at me then.  I wouldn’t be sure!”

He said nothing.  Speech was ice-bound till he had heard what she had to say.

“It all began to happen three years ago,” she said hurriedly, hiding her face from him with her hand while she hung over the fire.  “I was living with my brother, who was then near Winnipeg.  He offered me a home after my father died.  But he was married, and I didn’t get on with his wife.  I dare say it was my fault, but I wasn’t happy, and I wanted to get away.  Then a man—­an Englishman—­bought the next section to us, and we began to know him.  He was a gentleman—­he’d been to Cambridge—­his father had some land and a house in Lincolnshire.  But he was the third son, and he’d been taught land agency, he said, as a training for the colonies.  That was all we knew.  He was very good-looking, and he began courting me.  I suppose I was proud of his being a University man—­a public school boy, and all that.  He told me a lot of stories about his people, and his money—­most of which were lies.  But I was a fool—­and I believed them.  My brother tried to stop it.  Well, you know from his letters what sort of man he is,” and again she brushed the sudden tears away.  “But his wife made mischief, and I was set on having a place of my own.  So I stuck to it—­and married him.”

She rose abruptly from her seat and began to move restlessly about the room, taking up a book or her knitting from the table, and putting them down again, evidently unconscious of what she was doing.  Ellesborough waited.  His lean, sharply-cut face revealed a miserable, perhaps an agonized suspense.  This crisis into which she had plunged him so suddenly was bringing home to him all that he had at stake.  That she mattered to him so vitally he had never known till this moment.

“What’s the good of going into it!” she said at last desperately.  “You can guess—­what it means”—­a sudden crimson rushed to her cheeks—­“to be tied to a man—­without honour—­or principle—­or refinement—­who presently seemed to me vile all through—­in what he said—­or what he did.  And I was at his mercy.  I had married him in such a hurry he had a right to despise me, and he used it!  And when I resisted and turned against him, then I found out what his temper meant.”  She raised her shoulders with a gesture which needed no words.  “Well—­we got on somehow till my little girl was born—­”

Ellesborough started.  Rachel turned on him her sad, swimming eyes.  But the mere mention of her child had given her back her dignity and strength to go on.  She became visibly more composed, as she stood opposite to him, her beautiful dark head against the sunset clouds outside.