Meanwhile Pamela was begging Rachel to take off her hat and stay to dinner. "I'll 'phone for Belhaven," she urged.
Rachel colored; she could never conquer her inward start at the intimate association of Belhaven's name with hers. She stood in continued amazement at the miracle of their outward union and their actual aloofness. She evaded Mrs. Van Citters' urgency, however, and made her way at last to the door. Here she had to dismiss Paul with difficulty. She wanted to be alone, yet it was hard to escape an escort, especially now that it was dusk. However, she got away at last and walked swiftly out the long avenue to the suburbs. She felt an actual physical need of the long, hard climb; the exercise, the keen, cold air, the busy life of the thoroughfare, served to break the tension of her mood. She had scarcely seen her sister lately; Eva had withdrawn herself from her reach. She evaded her and refused to see her, pleading nerves, headaches, any indisposition, to escape, and Rachel felt that she understood and began herself to dread the resumption of any intimacy. Since her talk with Belhaven she had excused her sister less; she had not doubted her actual guiltlessness but she did doubt her innocence of treachery, in heart at least, to Astry. Between the actual crime and the guilt in thought there was a horrible propinquity which made Rachel shudder. She was aware of helping Eva to avoid her, but this condition of things could not last. The old relations of life remained, therefore she had immediately answered Eva's telephone message, and she was going on to her now.
In her heart Rachel hoped that Eva and Astry might yet be drawn together. She was sorry for Johnstone; it was like her to drop the thought of personal grievance in the larger considerations of justice and mercy, and she felt that Johnstone Astry had been hardly used. Since her talk with Belhaven she could not escape a horrid feeling of complicity in guilt against Astry; it made a bond between Eva, Belhaven, and herself, and it weighed heavily on Rachel's conscience. However, she was continually conscious now that Belhaven loved her; it seemed rather an increasing, than a decreasing, element in their relations. He had greatly changed and, in spite of herself, she began to like him. She saw that he blamed himself profoundly and that he clung to the thin thread of their friendship, a friendship that had grown on her side, too, during the weary months of their enforced companionship. The man was vitally changed; that he was less a coward, Rachel doubted; that he would ever transgress again she did not believe, not while his love for her held, and that thought forced home to her the sudden, unwelcome responsibility for this man's soul. He was weak; with her help he could stand,—without it? Rachel shivered; she longed to cry out with Cain: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
At the top of the long hill she stopped and looked back. The city lay at her feet and she recalled, with keen distress, that night when she had stood looking out of her window before Eva came to her door. Here again were the scroll-like mystery of the lights, the long bright vista of the avenues, the distant, classic dome and the ghostly shaft of the monument. The frosty air cooled her cheek, the snow crunched under her feet; above she saw the stars, keen as knife-points in the winter sky. A feeling of ineffable sorrow and loneliness swept over her; she seemed such an atom in this vast dark universe, such an atom to possess the power to rescue that mysterious thing, a human soul. "Am I my brother's keeper?" A supreme question, deeply and intimately thrust into her life. She shuddered slightly and turned away, the mystery of her fate seeming, at the moment, unsolvable.
This thought was still with her when she approached the big, Georgian house on the hill and entered the hall where she and Astry had stood together that afternoon before her marriage. She recalled it as she crossed it and ascended the stairs. She had never been able to quite discover her brother-in-law's thought through his words; even now she was not sure. On the wide landing, where she had stood to look into the conservatory, she met him. He was coming down-stairs, his hands thrust into the pockets of his smoking-jacket and his head thrown back in a pose that was easy and characteristic. His sleepy eyelids drooped over his light eyes, his complexion had the dead whiteness that comes sometimes with light brown hair.
"Hello, Rachel, you're quite a stranger. Going up to see Eva?"
"Of course I'm going up to see Eva."
"You'll find her as charming as ever."
Rachel looked back over her shoulder, still ascending, and their eyes met; his look was a challenge. She quickened her step and left him standing there, the memory of his expression freezing an impulse of happiness that had risen in her heart.
Eva had taken Rachel's old room and was standing at the window, looking out into the darkness as her sister entered.