’Why, my dear, we’ve never spoke friendly these five year.  You know she’s been as haughty as anything since I quarrelled with her husband.  However, let bygones be bygones:  I’ve no grudge again’ the poor thing, more particular as she must ha’ flew in her husband’s face to come an’ hear Mr. Tryan.  Yes, let us go an’ speak to her.’

The friendly words and looks touched Janet a little too keenly, and Mrs. Pettifer wisely hurried her home by the least-frequented road.  When they reached home, a violent fit of weeping, followed by continuous lassitude, showed that the emotions of the morning had overstrained her nerves.  She was suffering, too, from the absence of the long-accustomed stimulus which she had promised Mr. Tryan not to touch again.  The poor thing was conscious of this, and dreaded her own weakness, as the victim of intermittent insanity dreads the oncoming of the old illusion.

‘Mother,’ she whispered, when Mrs. Raynor urged her to lie down and rest all the afternoon, that she might be the better prepared to see Mr. Tryan in the evening ‘mother, don’t let me have anything if I ask for it.’

In the mother’s mind there was the same anxiety, and in her it was mingled with another fear—­the fear lest Janet, in her present excited state of mind, should take some premature step in relation to her husband, which might lead back to all the former troubles.  The hint she had thrown out in the morning of her wish to return to him after a time, showed a new eagerness for difficult duties, that only made the long-saddened sober mother tremble.  But as evening approached, Janet’s morning heroism all forsook her:  her imagination influenced by physical depression as well as by mental habits, was haunted by the vision of her husband’s return home, and she began to shudder with the yesterday’s dread.  She heard him calling her, she saw him going to her mother’s to look for her, she felt sure he would find her out, and burst in upon her.

‘Pray, pray, don’t leave me, don’t go to church,’ she said to Mrs. Pettifer.  ‘You and mother both stay with me till Mr. Tryan comes.’

At twenty minutes past six the church bells were ringing for the evening service, and soon the congregation was streaming along Orchard Street in the mellow sunset.  The street opened toward the west.  The red half-sunken sun shed a solemn splendour on the everyday houses, and crimsoned the windows of Dempster’s projecting upper storey.

Suddenly a loud murmur arose and spread along the stream of church-goers, and one group after another paused and looked backward.  At the far end of the street, men, accompanied by a miscellaneous group of onlookers, were slowly carrying something—­a body stretched on a door.  Slowly they passed along the middle of the street, lined all the way with awe-struck faces, till they turned aside and paused in the red sunlight before Dempster’s door.

It was Dempster’s body.  No one knew whether he was alive or dead.