“If Lord Newhaven had not turned giddy and stumbled on to the line, if he had not died by accident when he did,” said Hugh to himself, “where should I be now?”

There was no answer to that question.

What was the use of asking it?  He was dead.  And, fortunately, the two women firmly believed he had died by his own hand.  Hugh as firmly believed that the death was accidental.

But it could not be his duty to set them right, to rake up the whole hideous story again.

By an extraordinary, by a miraculous chance, he was saved, as it were, a second time.  It could do no good to allude to the dreadful subject again.  Besides, he had promised Rachel never to speak of it again.

He groaned, and hid his face in his hands.

“Oh, coward and wretch that I am,” he said.  “Cannot I even be honest with myself?  I lied to her to-day.  I never thought I could have told Rachel a lie, but I did.  I can’t live without her.  I must have her.  I would rather die than lose her now.  And I should have lost her if I’d told her the truth.  I felt that.  I am not worthy.  It was an ill day for her when she took my tarnished life into her white hands.  She ought to have trodden me under foot.  But she does love me, and I will never deceive her again.  She does love me, and, God helping me, I will make her happy.”

The strain of conflict was upon Hugh—­the old, old conflict of the seed with the earth, of the soul with love.  How many little fibres and roots the seed puts out, pushed by an unrecognized need within itself, not without pain, not without a gradual rending of its being, not without a death unto self into a higher life.  Love was dealing with Hugh’s soul as the earth deals with the seed, and—­he suffered.

It was a man who did not look like an accepted lover who presented himself at Rachel’s door the following afternoon.

But Rachel was not there.  Her secretary handed Hugh a little note which she had left for him, telling him that Hester had suddenly fallen ill, and that she had been sent for to Southminster.  The note ended:  “These first quiet days are past.  So now you may tell your mother, and put our engagement in the Morning Post.”

Hugh was astonished at the despair which overwhelmed him at the bare thought that he should not see Rachel that day and not the next either.  It was not to be borne.  She had no right to make him suffer like this.  Day by day, when a certain restless fever returned upon him, he had known, as an opium-eater knows, that at a certain hour he should become rested and calm and sane once more.  To be in the same room with Rachel, to hear her voice, to let his eyes dwell upon her, to lean his forehead for a moment against her hand, was to enter, as we enter in dreams, a world of joy and comfort, and boundless, endless, all-pervading peace.

And now he was suddenly left shivering in a bleak world without her.  With her he was himself, a released, freed self, growing daily further and further away from all he had once been.  Without her he felt he was nothing but a fierce, wounded animal.