With those words he hurried out.  In equal haste on my side, I ran upstairs to compose myself in my own room before meeting Aunt Ablewhite and Rachel at the luncheon-table.

I am well aware—­to dwell for a moment yet on the subject of Mr. Godfrey—­that the all-profaning opinion of the world has charged him with having his own private reasons for releasing Rachel from her engagement, at the first opportunity she gave him.  It has also reached my ears, that his anxiety to recover his place in my estimation has been attributed in certain quarters, to a mercenary eagerness to make his peace (through me) with a venerable committee-woman at the Mothers’ Small-Clothes, abundantly blessed with the goods of this world, and a beloved and intimate friend of my own.  I only notice these odious slanders for the sake of declaring that they never had a moment’s influence on my mind.  In obedience to my instructions, I have exhibited the fluctuations in my opinion of our Christian Hero, exactly as I find them recorded in my diary.  In justice to myself, let me here add that, once reinstated in his place in my estimation, my gifted friend never lost that place again.  I write with the tears in my eyes, burning to say more.  But no—­I am cruelly limited to my actual experience of persons and things.  In less than a month from the time of which I am now writing, events in the money-market (which diminished even my miserable little income) forced me into foreign exile, and left me with nothing but a loving remembrance of Mr. Godfrey which the slander of the world has assailed, and assailed in vain.

Let me dry my eyes, and return to my narrative.

I went downstairs to luncheon, naturally anxious to see how Rachel was affected by her release from her marriage engagement.

It appeared to me—­but I own I am a poor authority in such matters—­that the recovery of her freedom had set her thinking again of that other man whom she loved, and that she was furious with herself for not being able to control a revulsion of feeling of which she was secretly ashamed.  Who was the man?  I had my suspicions—­but it was needless to waste time in idle speculation.  When I had converted her, she would, as a matter of course, have no concealments from Me.  I should hear all about the man; I should hear all about the Moonstone.  If I had had no higher object in stirring her up to a sense of spiritual things, the motive of relieving her mind of its guilty secrets would have been enough of itself to encourage me to go on.

Aunt Ablewhite took her exercise in the afternoon in an invalid chair.  Rachel accompanied her.  “I wish I could drag the chair,” she broke out, recklessly.  “I wish I could fatigue myself till I was ready to drop.”

She was in the same humour in the evening.  I discovered in one of my friend’s precious publications—­the Life, Letters, and Labours of Miss Jane Ann Stamper, forty-fourth edition—­passages which bore with a marvellous appropriateness on Rachel’s present position.  Upon my proposing to read them, she went to the piano.  Conceive how little she must have known of serious people, if she supposed that my patience was to be exhausted in that way!  I kept Miss Jane Ann Stamper by me, and waited for events with the most unfaltering trust in the future.