“—­And when he turned away,” Hetty went on, “I understood.  And I felt sorry for him; because all of a sudden it came to me that he may be wiser than any of us, and one day it will be made plain to us, what we have helped to do—­or to spoil.”

“Here is someone you had better be sorry for,” said Emilia, glancing along the path at the sound of footsteps and catching sight of Nancy.  “She has made up her mind that John Lambert will have no more to do with us now; and the wedding not a month away!”

Sure enough, Nancy’s eyes were red, and she gazed at Hetty less with reprobation than with lugubrious reproach.

“Then she knows less of John Lambert than I do,” said Hetty; “and still less how deep he is in love with her.  Nancy dear,” she asked, “was he to have walked over this morning?”

“He was coming from Haxey way,” wailed Nancy.  “He was to have been here at ten o’clock and it is past that now.  Of course he has heard, and does not mean to come.”

Hetty choked down an exceeding bitter sob.

“Anne—­sister Anne,” she answered in her old light manner, though she desired to be alone and to weep:  “go, look along the road and say if you see anyone coming!”

Nancy turned away, too generous to upbraid her sister, but hotly ashamed of her and her lack of contrition, and indignantly sorry for herself.  Nevertheless she went towards the gate whence she could see along the road.

“It seems to me,” said Emilia, “that you are scarcely awake yet to your—­your situation.”

She was trying to recover her superiority, which Hetty had shaken by guessing her secret.

“Oh, yes I am,” Hetty answered.  “But my time may be short for talking:  so I use what ways I can to make my sisters listen.  Hark!”

“He is coming!” Nancy announced, running towards them from the gate.  Honest love shone in her eyes.  “He is coming—­and there is someone with him!”

“Who?” asked Emilia.  Hetty’s eyes put the same question, far more eagerly.  She rose up:  her face was white.

“I don’t know.  He—­they—­are half a mile away.  Yet I seem to know the figure.  It is odd now—­”

Hetty put out a hand and leaned it against the wood-stack to steady herself.  The sharpened end of a stake pierced her palm, but she did not feel it.

“Is it—­is it—­” Her lips worked and formed the words, inaudibly.

“Run and look again,” commanded Emilia.

But Hetty turned and walked swiftly away.  Could it be he?  No—­and yet why not?  Until this moment she had not known how much she built upon that chance.  She loved him still:  at the bottom of her heart most tenderly.  She had reproached herself, saying that her desire for him had nothing to do with love—­was no genuine impulse to forgive, but a selfish cowardly longing to be saved, as only he could save her.  She was wrong.  She desired to be saved:  but she desired far more wildly that he should play the man, justify her love and earn forgiveness.  She had—­and was, alas! to prove it—­an almost infinite capacity to forgive.  She, Hetty, of the reckless wit and tongue—­she would meet him humbly—­as one whose sin had been as deep as his . . .