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.

Master Gammon met them in the garden.

Pointing aloft, over the gateway, “That’s down,” he remarked, and the three green front teeth of his quiet grin were stamped on the impressionable vision of the girls in such a way that they looked at one another with a bare bitter smile.  Once it would have been mirth.

“Tell father,” Dahlia said, when they were at the back doorway, and her eyes sparkled piteously, and she bit on her underlip.  Rhoda tried to detain her; but Dahlia repeated, “Tell father,” and in strength and in will had become more than a match for her sister.

CHAPTER XLV

Rhoda spoke to her father from the doorway, with her hand upon the lock of the door.

At first he paid little attention to her, and, when he did so, began by saying that he hoped she knew that she was bound to have the young squire, and did not intend to be prankish and wilful; because the young squire was eager to settle affairs, that he might be settled himself.  “I don’t deny it’s honour to us, and it’s a comfort,” said the farmer.  “This is the first morning I’ve thought easily in my chair for years.  I’m sorry about Robert, who’s a twice unlucky ’un; but you aimed at something higher, I suppose.”