Of late he had seemed--not to Rachel, but to Mrs. Reade--to have a sort of half-sullen doggedness in his determination, indicating that he was as much bent upon winning the game as upon winning the stakes--that he meant, before all things, not to be beaten in the enterprise upon which he had set his heart. And in this frame of mind he waited upon opportunity; and in the end, opportunity, as so often happens in such cases, served him. One day Beatrice and her husband went out of town to lunch, and Rachel had a long, lonely afternoon. It came on to rain, and it was grey and chilly. Dull weather always sent her spirits down several degrees below the normal temperature, and just now she was morbidly sensitive to its influence. If Beatrice had been at home there would have been a fire in no time, summer though it was; in her absence Rachel did not like to take upon herself to order one. She lay on a sofa with a shawl over her feet, and listened to the rain pattering on the window, and felt cold, and dismal, and deserted. At five o'clock she was pining for her tea, and thinking it had been forgotten, rang for it; and the smart young parlour-maid, interrupted in an interesting _tete-a-tete_ with the next door coachman, and blessed with few opportunities for the indulgence of a naturally restive temper, brought it in with a protesting _nonchalance_, a teapotful of nasty liquid, made with water that had not boiled, and a couple of slices of bread and butter that would have charmed a hungry schoolboy--such as would never have been presented to the mistress of the house, as Rachel well knew. This small indignity, so very small as it was, greatly aggravated the vague sense of desolation and orphanhood--the feeling that she was a person of no consequence to anybody--which possessed her just now. And while she was in the lowest depths of despondency, in the deepest indigo of blues, Mr. Kingston calling, discovered her solitude and came in, tenderly deferential, full of solicitude for her health and comfort, stooping from his higher sphere of social importance to pay homage to her still in her forlorn insignificance. For the space of half-an-hour perhaps she felt that it would be good to be married to somebody--to anybody--who would love and take care of her, and make the servants treat her with proper respect; and a mere chance enabled Mr. Kingston to take advantage of that accident. Looking back afterwards she never could understand how it was that she had felt disposed to re-accept him; but the causes were as distinct as causes usually are. Badly-made tea, and the want of a fire in dull weather are, amongst the multifarious factors of human destiny, greatly underrated. Having said the fatal "yes"--or, rather, having failed at the proper moment to say "no," which Mr. Kingston justly took to mean the same thing--Rachel was allowed no more opportunities for what her aunt called "shilly-shallying."