She heard no footsteps.  No voice called her.  Unable to endure it longer, she came to a standstill and looked back.  Between her and the parsonage buildings the wide fields were empty.  She could see the corner of the woodstack.  No one stood there.  Away to the left two figures diminished by distance followed a footpath arm-in-arm—­ John Lambert and Nancy.

A great blackness fell on her.  She had no pride now; she turned and went slowly back, not to the parsonage, but aslant by the bank of a dyke leading to the highroad along which, a few hours ago, she had returned so wearily.  She must watch and discover what man it was who had come with John Lambert.

Before she reached the low bridge by the road, she heard a tune whistled and a man’s footfall approaching—­not his.  She supposed it to be one of the labourers, and in a sudden terror hid herself behind an ash-bole on the brink.

The man went by, still whistling cheerfully.  She peered around the tree and watched him as he retreated—­a broad-shouldered man, swinging a cudgel.  A hundred yards or less beyond her tree he halted, with his back to her, in the middle of the road, and stayed his whistling while he made two or three ludicrous cuts with his cudgel at the empty air.  This pantomime over, he resumed his way.

She recognised him by so much of his back as showed over the dwarf hedge.  It was William Wright.

Was it he, then, who had come with John Lambert?  Hetty sat down by the tree, and, with her eyes on the slow water in the dyke, began to think.

To be sure, this man might have come to Wroote merely for his money.  Yet (as she firmly believed) it was he who had written the letter which in effect had led to her running away.  He might have used the debt to-day as a pretext.  His motive, she felt certain, was curiosity to learn what his letter had brought about.

She bore him no grudge.  He had fired the train—­oh, no doubt!  But she was clear-sighted now, saw that the true fault after all was hers, and would waste no time in accusing others.  Very soon she dismissed him from her mind.  In all the blank hopelessness of her fall from hope she put aside self-pity, and tasked herself to face the worst.  To Emilia and Nancy she had spoken lightly, as if scarcely alive to her dreadful position, still less alive to her sin.  They had misunderstood her:  but in truth she had spoken so on the instinct of self-defence.  Real defence she had none.

She knew she had none.  And let it be said here that she saw no comfortable hope in religion.  She had listened to a plenty of doctrine from her early childhood:  but somehow the mysteries of God had seldom occupied her thoughts, never as bearing directly on the questions of daily life.  If asked, for example, “did she believe in the Trinity?” or “did she believe in justification by faith?” she would have answered “yes,” without hesitating for a moment.  But in fact