“Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sinceres.”  She had come across that sentence one day in a book she was reading, and had turned suddenly blind and cold with anger.  “He is sincere,” she said, fiercely, as if repelling an accusation.  “He would never deceive me.”  But no one had accused Hugh.

The same evening he made the confession for which she had waited so long.  As he began to speak an intolerable suspense, like a new and acute form of a familiar disease, lay hold on her.  Was he going to live or die.  She should know at last.  Was she to part with him, to bury love for the second time?  Or was she to keep him, to be his wife, the mother of his children?

As he went on, his language becoming more confused; she hardly listened to him.  She had known all that too long.  She had forgiven it, not without tears; but still, she had forgiven it long ago.  Then he stopped.  It seemed to Rachel as if she had reached a moment in life which she could not bear.  She waited, but still he did not speak.  Then she was not to know.  She was to be ground between the millstones of four more dreadful days and nights.  She suddenly became aware, as she stared at Hugh’s blanching face, that he believed she was about to dismiss him.  The thought had never entered her mind.

“Do you not know that I love you?” she said, silently, to him, as he kissed her hand.

When he had left her a gleam of comfort came to her, the only gleam that lightened the days and nights that followed.  It was not his fault if he had made a half-confession.  If he had gone on, and had told her of the drawing of lots, and which had drawn the fatal lot, he would have been wanting in sense of honor.  He owed it to the man he had injured to preserve entire secrecy.

“He told me of the sin which might affect my marrying him,” said Rachel, “but the rest had nothing to do with me.  He was right not to speak of it.  If he had told me, and then a few days afterwards Lord Newhaven had committed suicide, he would know I should put two and two together, and who the woman was, and the secret would not have died with Lord Newhaven as it ought to do.  But if Hugh were the man who had to kill himself, he might have told me so without a breach of confidence, because then I should never have guessed who the others were.  If he were the man he could have told me, he certainly would have told me, for it could have done no harm to any one.  Surely Lady Newhaven must be right when she was so certain that her husband had drawn the short lighter.  And she herself had gained the same impression from what Hugh had vaguely said at Wilderleigh.  But what are impressions, suppositions, except the food of suspense.”  Rachel sighed, and took up her burden as best she could.  Hugh’s confession had at least one source of comfort in it, deadly cold comfort if he were about to leave her.  She knew that night as she lay awake that she had not quite trusted him up till now,