Dieu n’oublie personne. Il visite tout le monde.

— VINET.

HUGH did not sleep that night.

His escape had been too narrow. He shivered at the mere thought of it. It had never struck him as possible that Rachel and Lady Newhaven had known of the drawing of lots. Now that he found they knew, sundry small incidents, unnoticed at the time, came crowding back to his memory. That was why Lady Newhaven had written so continually those letters which he had burnt unread. That was why she had made that desperate attempt to see him in the smoking-room at Wilderleigh after the boating accident. She wanted to know which had drawn the short lighter. That explained the mysterious tension which Hugh had noticed in Rachel during the last days in London before — before the time was up. He saw it all now. And, of course, they naturally supposed that Lord Newhaven had committed suicide. They could not think otherwise. They were waiting for one of the two men to do it.

“If Lord Newhaven had not turned giddy and stumbled on to the line, if he had not died by accident when he did,” said Hugh to himself, “where should I be now?”

There was no answer to that question.

What was the use of asking it? He was dead. And, fortunately, the two women firmly believed he had died by his own hand. Hugh as firmly believed that the death was accidental.

But it could not be his duty to set them right, to rake up the whole hideous story again.

By an extraordinary, by a miraculous chance, he was saved, as it were, a second time. It could do no good to allude to the dreadful subject again. Besides, he had promised Rachel never to speak of it again.

He groaned, and hid his face in his hands.

“Oh, coward and wretch that I am,” he said. “Cannot I even be honest with myself? I lied to her to-day. I never thought I could have told Rachel a lie, but I did. I can’t live without her. I must have her. I would rather die than lose her now. And I should have lost her if I’d told her the truth. I felt that. I am not worthy. It was an ill day for her when she took my tarnished life into her white hands. She ought to have trodden me under foot. But she does love me, and I will never deceive her again. She does love me, and, God helping me, I will make her happy.”

The strain of conflict was upon Hugh — the old, old conflict of the seed with the earth, of the soul with love. How many little fibres and roots the seed puts out, pushed by an unrecognised need within itself, not without pain, not without a gradual rending of its being, not without a death unto self into a higher life. Love was dealing with Hugh’s soul as the earth deals with the seed, and — he suffered.

It was a man who did not look like an accepted lover who presented himself at Rachel’s door the following afternoon.

But Rachel was not there. Her secretary handed Hugh a little note which she had left for him, telling him that Hester had suddenly fallen ill, and that she had been sent for to Southminster. The note ended: “These first quiet days are past. So now you may tell your mother, and put our engagement in the Morning Post.”

Hugh was astonished at the despair which overwhelmed him at the bare thought that he should not see Rachel that day and not the next either. It was not to be borne. She had no right to make him suffer like this. Day by day, when a certain restless fever returned upon him, he had known, as an opium eater knows, that at a certain hour he should become rested and calm and sane once more. To be in the same room with Rachel, to hear her voice, to let his eyes dwell upon her, to lean his forehead for a moment against her hand, was to enter, as we enter in dreams, a world of joy and comfort, and boundless, endless, all-pervading peace.

And now he was suddenly left shivering in a bleak world without her. With her he was himself, a released, freed self, growing daily further and further away from all he had once been. Without her he felt he was nothing but a fierce wounded animal.

He tried to laugh at himself as he walked slowly away from Rachel’s house. He told himself that he was absurd, that an absence of a few days was nothing. He turned his steps mechanically in the direction of his mother’s lodgings. At any rate, he could tell her. He could talk about this cruel woman to her. The smart was momentarily soothed by his mother’s painful joy. He wrenched himself somewhat out of himself as she wept the tears of jealous love which all mothers must weep when the woman comes who takes their son away.

“I am so glad,” she kept repeating. “These are tears of joy, Hughie. I can forgive her for accepting you, but I should never have forgiven her if she had refused you — if she had made my boy miserable. And you have been miserable lately I have seen it for a long time. I suppose it was all this coming on.”

He said it was. The remembrance of other causes of irritation and moodiness had slipped entirely off his mind.

He stayed a long time with his mother, who pressed him to wait till his sister, who was shopping, returned. But his sister tarried long out of doors, and at last the pain of Rachel’s absence returning on him, he left suddenly, promising to return in the evening.

He did not go back to his rooms. He wandered aimlessly through the darkening streets, impatient of the slow hours. At last he came out on the Embankment. The sun was setting redly, frostily, in a grey world of sky-mist and river-mist and spectral bridge and spire. A shaking pathway of pale flame came across the grey of the hidden river to meet him.

He stood a long time looking at it. The low sun touched and forsook, touched and forsook point by point the little crowded world which it was leaving.

“My poor mother,” said Hugh to himself. “Poor, gentle, loving soul whom I so nearly brought down with sorrow to the grave. She will never know what an escape she has had. I might have been more to her. I might have made her happier, seeing her happiness is wrapped up in me. I will make up to her for it. I will be a better son to her in future. Rachel and I together will make her last years happy. Rachel and I together,” said Hugh over and over again.

And then he suddenly remembered that though Rachel had taken herself away he could write to her, and — he might look out the trains to Southminster. He leaped into a hansom and hurried back to his rooms.

The porter met him in a mysterious manner in the entrance. Lady waiting to see him. Lady said she was his sister. Had been waiting two hours. In his rooms now.

Hugh laughed and ran up the wide common staircase. His sister had heard the news from his mother and had rushed over at once.

As he stooped a little to fit the latch-key on his chain into the lock a man, who was coming down the stairs feeling in his pockets, stopped with a sudden exclamation. It was Captain Pratt, pallid, smiling, hair newly varnished, resplendent in a magnificent fur overcoat.

“What luck,” he said. “Scarlett, I think. We met at Wilderleigh. Have you such a thing as a match about you?”

Hugh felt in his pockets. He had not one.

“Never mind,” he said, opening the door. “I’ve plenty insid............