"Rachel!"
"Well, that's how I feel. If he gives me up, it will be death—though I dare say I shall go on fussing round the farm, and people will still talk to me as if I were alive. But!"—she shrugged her shoulders.
"He won't give you up—" said Janet, much troubled—"because—because he's a good man."
"All the more reason. If I were he, I should give me up. Shall I tell you a queer thing, Janet? I hate Roger, as much as I can hate anybody. It would be a great relief to me if I heard he were dead. And yet at the same time I see—oh yes, I see quite plainly—that I treated him badly. He told me so the other night—and it is so—it's true. I never had the least patience with him. And now he's dying—at least he says so—and though I hate him—though I pray I may never, never see him again, yet I'm sorry for him. Isn't that strange?"
She looked at Janet with a queer flickering defiance, which was also a kind of remorse, in her eyes.
"No, it isn't strange."
"Why not?—when I hate him?"
"One can be sorry even for those one hates. I suppose God is," Janet added, after a pause.
Rachel made a little face of scorn.
"Why should God hate any one? He made us. He's responsible. He must have known what He was doing. If He really pitied us, would He have made us at all?"