On ne peut jamais dire.

Fontaine je ne boirai jamais de ton eau.

IF we could choose our ills we should not choose suspense. Rachel aged perceptibly during these last weeks. Her strong white hands became thinner, her lustreless eyes and haggard face betrayed her. In years gone by she had said to herself, when a human love had failed her, “I will never put myself through this torture a second time. Whatever happens I will not endure it again.”

And now she was enduring it again, though in a different form. There is an element of mother love in the devotion which some women give to men. In the first instance it had opened the door of Rachel’s heart to Hugh, and had gradually merged with other feelings and deepened into the painful love of a woman not in her first youth for a man of whom she is not sure.

Rachel was not sure of Hugh. Of his love for her she was sure, but not of the man himself, the gentle, refined, lovable nature that mutely worshipped and clung to her. She could not repulse him any more than she could repulse a child. But through all her knowledge of him, the knowledge of love — the only true knowledge of our fellow creatures — a thread of doubtful anxiety was interwoven. She could form some idea how men like Dick, Lord Newhaven, or the Bishop would act in given circumstances, but she could form no definite idea how Hugh would act in the same circumstances. Yet she knew Hugh a thousand times better than any of the others. Why was this? Many women before Rachel have sought diligently to find, and have shut their eyes diligently, lest they should discover what it is that is dark to them in the character of the man they love.

Perhaps Rachel half knew all the time the subtle inequality in Hugh’s character. Perhaps she loved him all the better for it. Perhaps she knew that if he had been without a certain undefinable weakness he would not have been drawn towards her strength. She was stronger than he, and perhaps she loved him more than she could have loved an equal.

“Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sincères.” She had come across that sentence one day in a book she was reading, and had turned suddenly blind and cold with anger. “He is sincere,” she said fiercely, as if repelling an accusation. “He would never deceive me.” But no one had accused Hugh.

The same evening he made the confession for which she had waited so long. As he began to speak an intolerable suspense, like a new and acute form of a familiar disease, lay hold on her. Was he going to live or die? She should know at last. Was she to part with him, to bury love for the second time, or was she to keep him, to be his wife, the mother of his children?

As he went on, his language becoming more confused, she hardly listened to him. She had known all that too long. She had forgiven it, not without tears; but still, she had forgiven it long ago. Then he stopped. It seemed to Rachel as if she had reached a moment in life which she could not bear. She waited, but still he did not speak. Then she was not to know. She was to be ground between the millstones of four more dreadful days and nights. She suddenly became aware, as she stared at Hugh’s blanching face, that he believed she was about to dismiss h............