Yet another feeling, and one oddly new, assailed him during those long hours which were spent in Barbara's company--now in the quiet stately downstair rooms of the Priory, now out of doors, ay, and even by Madame Sampiero's couch, for there Barbara, as if vaguely conscious of pursuit, would often take refuge. Jealousy, actual and retrospective jealousy, sharpened the edge of Berwick's feeling,--jealousy of Boringdon, of whom he gathered Barbara had lately seen so much, and with whom, as he could himself see, she must be on terms of pleasant comradeship--jealousy, far more poignant and searching, of Pedro Rebell, and of that past which the woman Berwick was beginning to regard as wholly his, had spent with him. Mrs. Rebell never made the slightest allusion to her husband, and yet for six long years--those formative years between nineteen and five-and-twenty--Pedro Rebell must have been, and in a sense rarely allowed to civilised man, the master of this delicate, sensitive woman, and, when he so pleased, her lover. Who else save the half-Spanish West Indian planter could have brought that shadow of fear into Barbara's eyes, and have made her regard the passion of love, as Berwick had very soon divined she did regard it, as something which shames rather than exalts human nature? From one and another, going even to Chancton Cottage, and questioning Mrs. Boringdon in his desire to know what Barbara he knew well would never tell him, Berwick had so far pieced together her past history as to come somewhere near the truth of what her life had been. He could picture Barbara's quiet childhood at St. Germains: could follow her girlhood--spent partly in France, partly in Italy--to which, as she grew to know him better, she often referred, and which had given her a kind of mental cultivation which, to such a man as himself, was peculiarly agreeable. Then, lastly, and most often, he would recall her long sojourn in the lonely West Indian plantation. There, if Grace Johnstone was to be believed, she had at times suffered actual physical ill-treatment from the man whom she had married because he had come across her path at a moment when she had been left utterly alone; and also because--so Berwick, as he grew to understand her, truly divined--Pedro Rebell bore her father's name, and shared the nationality of which those English men and women who are condemned to exile are so pathetically proud. * * * * * Mrs. Turke, Doctor McKirdy, and Madame Sampiero all watched with varying feelings the little drama which was being enacted before their eyes.