Eva looked at her wildly. "Rachel, I'll do it if it will help you, if you can get a divorce."
Rachel shook her head. "I've always thought marriage too sacred to break so lightly. It hurt most to have taken the vows as I did, but it isn't only that. If I got it, Eva, all that I've done, all that I've suffered, would go for nothing, for it would publish the scandal; I couldn't save your good name."
Eva gazed at her with growing terror, her lips shaking. "Oh, Rachel, how awful! You're caught in a trap, and I did it!"
"I shan't feel that it's all in vain, I shan't even count the suffering too much, if it means that I've saved you, Eva, if I've brought you back to your husband."
Eva flung herself into her arms with a sob. "I'm not worth saving," she cried, "and I've ruined your life!"
XV
When Rachel finally got home she remembered with relief that Belhaven dined out that evening. She had forgotten it, forgotten everything but the misery of Eva's confession. But now she refused the dinner that the servants had prepared for her and asked, instead, for a cup of tea. She laid aside her furs mechanically and went into the old tap-room. Its aspect, with the fire on the hearth and the candles on the tea-table, gave her almost a shock. She had the dazed feeling of one who has been away a long time and come back to find material things unchanged.
She stood looking at the room, trying to recall its normal aspect, for its cheerfulness mocked her. Under her rule it had assumed an appearance so warm and homely and inviting that she had grown to love it, and it had touched her once when she found Belhaven there looking about him in a kind of despair.
"You've made it like home," he said to her, "and I wish you might come to be happy in it."
At the time she had found a gentle answer; now she felt that it would shrivel on her lips. He and Eva had sacrificed her to their sin and their cowardice; or was it only Eva's cowardice, her determination to escape the consequences of her own act? Yet, poor Eva! The thought of her, broken and penitent, touched the wellspring of her sister's sympathy. But the facts of life remained; how was she to meet them? How endure this tissue of falsehood? She, too, had helped deceive her brother-in-law, for however she tried to excuse herself, in the light of Eva's confession, she was party to a conspiracy to deceive the husband. She felt again the subtle, bonds of complicity in guilt against Astry, as if in the law she had compounded a felony; yet she was, for the first time, drawn toward him as her fellow sufferer. Astry and herself were the victims; they paid the piper. Then came again the pity for Eva, the sinner who so needed help and forgiveness, whom she could not betray, not even to escape the shackles that bound her.