Janet made a little protesting sound—a sound of pain.
"Does it give you the shivers, old woman, when I talk like that?" Rachel slipped her hand affectionately through Janet's arm. "Well, I won't, then. But if—" she caught her breath a little—"if George casts me off, don't expect me to sing psalms and take it piously. I don't know myself just lately—I seem quite strange to myself."
And Janet, glancing at her sideways, wondered indeed where all that rosy-cheeked, ripe bloom had gone, which so far had made the constant charm of Rachel Henderson. Instead a bloodless face, with pinched lines, and heavy-lidded eyes! What a formidable thing was this "love," that she herself had never known, though she had had her quiet dreams of husband and children, like her fellows.
Rachel, however, would not let herself be talked with or pitied. She walked resolutely to the house, and went off to the fields to watch Halsey cutting and trimming a hedge.
"If he doesn't come before dark," she said, under her breath, to Janet, before setting off—"it will be finished. If he does—"
She hurried away without finishing the sentence, and was presently taking a lesson from old Halsey, in what is fast becoming one of the rarest of the rural arts. But in little more than half an hour, Janet bringing in the cows, saw her return and go into the house. The afternoon was still lovely—the sky, a pale gold, with thin bars of grey cloud lying across it, and the woods, all delicate shades of brown and purple, with their topmost branches clear against the gold. The old red walls and tiled roofs of the farm, the fields, the great hay and straw stacks, were all drenched in the soft winter light.
Rachel went up to her room, and sat down before the bare deal dressing-table which held her looking-glass, and the very few articles of personal luxury she possessed; a pair of silver-backed brushes and a hand-glass that had belonged to an aunt, a small leather case in which she kept some modest trinkets—a pearl brooch, a bracelet or two, and a locket that had been her mother's—and, standing on either side of the glass, two photographs of her father and mother.
There was a clock on the mantelpiece. "Nearly four o'clock—" she thought—"I'll give it an hour. He'd send—if he couldn't come, and he wanted to come—but if nothing happens—I shall know what to think."
As this passed through her mind, she opened one of the drawers of the dressing-table, in which she kept her gloves and handkerchiefs. Suddenly she perceived at the back of the drawer a small leathern case. The colour rushed into her face. She took it out and ran quickly down the stairs to the kitchen. Janet and the girls were busy milking. The coast was clear.
A bright fire which Janet had just made up was burning in the kitchen. Rachel went up to it and thrust the leathern case into the red core of it. Some crackling—a disagreeable smell—and the little thing had soon vanished. Rachel went slowly upstairs again, and locked the door of her room behind her. The drawer of the dressing-table was still open, and there was visible in it the object she was really in search of, when the little leathern case caught her eye—a small cloth-bound book marked "Diary."