“You’ve thrown her off, man, and sold what rights you had,” said Robert, spying for the point of his person where he might grasp the wretch and keep him off.

“That don’t hold in law,” Sedgett nodded.  “A man may get in a passion, when he finds he’s been cheated, mayn’t he?”

“I have your word of honour,” said Rhoda; muttering, “Oh! devil come to wrong us!”

“Then, you shouldn’t ha’ run ferreting down in my part o’ the country.  You, or Eccles—­I don’t care who ’tis—­you’ve been at my servants to get at my secrets.  Some of you have.  You’ve declared war.  You’ve been trying to undermine me.  That’s a breach, I call it.  Anyhow, I’ve come for my wife.  I’ll have her.”

“None of us, none of us; no one has been to your house,” said Rhoda, vehemently.  “You live in Hampshire, sir, I think; I don’t know any more.  I don’t know where.  I have not asked my sister.  Oh! spare us, and go.”

“No one has been down into your part of the country,” said Robert, with perfect mildness.

To which Sedgett answered bluffly, “There ye lie, Bob Eccles;” and he was immediately felled by a tremendous blow.  Robert strode over him, and taking Dahlia by the elbow, walked three paces on, as to set her in motion.  “Off!” he cried to Rhoda, whose eyelids cowered under the blaze of his face.

It was best that her sister should be away, and she turned and walked swiftly, hurrying Dahlia, and touching her.  “Oh! don’t touch my arm,” Dahlia said, quailing in the fall of her breath.  They footed together, speechless; taking the woman’s quickest gliding step.  At the last stile of the fields, Rhoda saw that they were not followed.  She stopped, panting:  her heart and eyes were so full of that flaming creature who was her lover.  Dahlia took from her bosom the letter she had won in the morning, and held it open in both hands to read it.  The pause was short.  Dahlia struck the letter into her bosom again, and her starved features had some of the bloom of life.  She kept her right hand in her pocket, and Rhoda presently asked,—­

“What have you there?”

“You are my enemy, dear, in some things,” Dahlia replied, a muscular shiver passing over her.

“I think,” said Rhoda, “I could get a little money to send you away.  Will you go?  I am full of grief for what I have done.  God forgive me.”

“Pray, don’t speak so; don’t let us talk,” said Dahlia.

Scorched as she felt both in soul and body, a touch or a word was a wound to her.  Yet she was the first to resume:  “I think I shall be saved.  I can’t quite feel I am lost.  I have not been so wicked as that.”

Rhoda gave a loving answer, and again Dahlia shrank from the miserable comfort of words.

As they came upon the green fronting the iron gateway, Rhoda perceived that the board proclaiming the sale of Queen Anne’s Farm had been removed, and now she understood her father’s readiness to go up to Wrexby Hall.  “He would sell me to save the farm.”  She reproached herself for the thought, but she could not be just; she had the image of her father plodding relentlessly over the burnt heath to the Hall, as conceived by her agonized sensations in the morning, too vividly to be just, though still she knew that her own indecision was to blame.