“All the minute details, the thought and anxiety, my business, or rather our business, requires an enormous help—­it is such a boon to be too weary at night-time to think!  But no amount of work, of care, can quite shut out the light of other days.  It is no doubt wrong, immoral, unworthy of a reformed outcast, but if my real heart’s desire could be fulfilled, I would live over again those few months of exquisite happiness, and die before waking to the terrible reality of my insignificance in the sight of him who was more than life to me—­die while I was still something to be missed, to be regretted.  He would have tired of me had I been his wife, and that would have been as terrible as my present lot—­even more, for I must have seen his weariness day by day, and no amount of social esteem would have consoled me.  As it is, my real self seems to have died, and this creature”—­striking her breast—­“was a cunningly contrived machine, that can work, and understand, but, save for one friend, cannot feel.  I do not even look back to him with any regretful tenderness.  I do not love him—­that is dead.  I do not hate him—­I have no right.  He did not deceive me; I voluntarily overstepped the line which separates the reputable and disreputable; as long as I was loved and cherished I never felt as if I had done wrong.  I never felt humiliation when I was with him.  When he grew tired of me he could not help it; he never did try to resist any whim or passion.  But better, stronger men cannot hold the wavering will-o’-the-wisp they call ‘love’; and once it flickers out, it cannot be relighted.  No, I have no one to blame; I can only resign myself to the bitterest, cruelest fate that can befall a woman—­to be loved and eagerly sought, won, and adored for a brief hour, then thrown carelessly aside—­a mere plaything, unworthy of serious thought.  Ah, I have forgotten my resolution not to talk of myself to you.  It is a weakness; but your kind eyes melt my heart.  Now I will close it up—­I will think only of the task I have set myself, to make a little fortune for you, a reputation for my own establishment—­not a very grand ambition, but it does to keep the machine going; and I am growing stronger every day, with a strange force that surprises myself.  I fear nothing and no one.  I think my affection for you, dear, is the only thing which keeps me human.  Now tell me, are you still comfortable with Mrs. Needham?”

The tears stood in Katherine’s eyes as she listened to this stern wail of a bruised spirit, but with instinctive wisdom she refrained from uttering fruitless expressions of sympathy.  She would not encourage Rachel to dwell on the hateful subject; she only replied by pressing her friend’s hand in silence, and she began to speak of Mrs. Ormonde’s visit, and succeeded in making Rachel laugh at the little woman’s description of the means she adopted of reducing Colonel Ormonde to reason.

“Real generosity and unselfishness is very rare,” said Rachel.  “The meanness and narrowness of men are amazing—­and of women too; but somehow one expects more from the strength of a man.”