Rachel sat down again, and waited patiently for the hysterical weeping to cease.  Those in whom others confide early learn that their own engagements, their own pleasures and troubles, are liable to be set aside at any moment.  Rachel was a punctual, exact person, but she missed many trains.  Those who sought her seldom realized that her day was as full as, possibly fuller, than their own.  Perhaps it was only a very small pleasure to which she had been on her way on this particular morning, and for which she had put on that ethereal gray gown for the first time.  At any rate, she relinquished it without a second thought.

Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes and turned impulsively towards her.

The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to guess which would come uppermost.  Sometimes fragments of both appeared on the surface together.

“I loved you from the first moment I saw you,” she said.  “I don’t take fancies to people, you know.  I am not that kind of person.  I am very difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns myself.  I am most reserved.  I dare say you have noticed how reserved I am.  I live in my shell.  But directly I saw you I felt I could talk to you.  I said to myself, ‘I will make a friend of that girl.’  Although I always feel a married woman is so differently placed from a girl.  A girl only thinks of herself.  I am not saying this the least unkindly, but, of course, it is so.  Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all she says and does.  How will it affect them? That is what I so often say to myself, and then my lips are sealed.  But, of course, being unmarried, you would not understand that feeling.”

Rachel did not answer.  She was inured to this time-honored conversational opening.

“And the temptations of married life,” continued Lady Newhaven—­“a girl cannot enter into them.”

“Then do not tell me about them,” said Rachel, smiling, wondering if she might still escape.  But Lady Newhaven had no intention of letting her go.  She only wished to indicate to her her true position.  And gradually, not without renewed outbursts of tears, not without traversing many layers of prepared conventional feelings, in which a few thin streaks of genuine emotion wore embedded, she told her story—­the story of a young, high-minded, and neglected wife, and of a husband callous, indifferent, a scorner of religion, unsoftened even by the advent of the children—­“such sweet children, such little darlings”—­and the gradual estrangement.  Then came the persistent siege to the lonely heart of one not pretty, perhaps, but fatally attractive to men; the lonely heart’s unparalleled influence for good over the besieger.

“He would do anything,” said Lady Newhaven, looking earnestly at Rachel.  “My influence over him is simply boundless.  If I said, as I sometimes did at balls, how sorry I was to see some plain girl standing out, he would go and dance with her.  I have seen him do it.”