She put Johnstone's letter down by the other, but Berwick left them lying there; he still looked at her with a probing, suspicious look, and she began to be desperately afraid. At Santa Maria she had once met a miserable white man, the overseer of a neighbouring plantation, who was said to have suddenly gone "fantee"--so had that man looked at her, as Berwick was doing now, dumbly. Was this what he had meant when he had spoken to her in the carriage of ungovernable impulses--of actions of which he had afterwards felt bitterly ashamed? Very slowly, still looking at her, he at last took up the two letters. Then, with a sudden movement, and without having looked at it, he put Boringdon's back on the ledge of the prie-dieu. "No," he said roughly, "not that one--I do not think he ought to write to you, but no matter!" Barbara felt herself trembling. She was beginning to understand. Berwick's hands fingered nervously the West Indian letter; at last he held it out to her, still folded, in his hand. "Here it is--take it--I won't read it!" "Oh! but do," she said. "It is from Mr. Johnstone, saying that he has received the money you so kindly arranged to send back for me." But Barbara's words came too late. "Mr. Johnstone?" Berwick repeated the name, then laughed harshly. "Fool that I was not to think of him! But all to-day, since McGregor gave me that letter, I have been in hell. Of course you know what I believed"--Barbara's lips quivered, and her look of suffering ought to have disarmed the man who was staring at her so insistently, but he was still possessed by a jealous devil. "Tell me"--and, leaning over the prie-dieu, he grasped her hands--"We may as well have it out now. Do you hear from him--from your husband, I mean? Do you write to him--sometimes?" She shook her head, and Berwick, at last free to see the agony and surrender in the face into which he was looking down, and to which he suddenly felt his lips so near, was swept by an irresistible rush and mingling of feelings--remorse and fierce relief, shame and exultant joy. "I think we ought to go downstairs,"--Arabella's clear voice broke into and echoed through the silent room. Berwick straightened himself slowly. Before releasing Barbara's hands he kissed first one and then the other. As he did so, passion seemed to melt into tenderness. How fragile, how childish he had thought the fingers resting on his arm that first evening of their acquaintance! He remembered also the fluttering, the trembling of her ringless left hand when for a moment he had covered it with his own during that drive from Halnakeham to Chillingworth, when he had made so much--or was it so little?--of his opportunity.