Berwick had judged truly the woman he had grown to love with so intimate an understanding and sympathy. The news of approaching release let loose in Barbara's mind a flood of agonising memories, which crowded out for a while everything else. During the long years she had endured every humiliation such a man as Pedro Rebell could inflict on so proud, and so sensitive a human being as herself, she had never foreseen this way of escape. He had ever seemed instinct with a rather malignant vitality, and the young,--Barbara had remained in some ways very young after her marriage,--are not apt to take death into their calculations. For some days she told none of those about her of the astounding news she had received from Santa Maria, but the two in whose thoughts she dwelt constantly divined her knowledge. It quickened Boringdon's desire to leave Chancton, and, with that self-delusion to which men who love are so often prone, in Mrs. Rebell's new coldness of manner to himself, he saw hope. Not so James Berwick,--he, judging more truly, was seized with a great fear lest Barbara should think it her duty to go back to Santa Maria. Rather than that, so he told himself during those days of strain and waiting for the confidence which she withheld, he would go himself,--men have gone stranger pilgrimages on behalf of their beloveds. At last he told her that he knew what was so deeply troubling her. "And you are thinking," he said quietly, "that perhaps you ought to go back and look after him till the end? Is not that so?" Barbara looked at him very piteously,--they were walking under the beeches, and, having wandered off the path, were now utterly alone. But, before she could speak, he again opened his lips: "If such action is necessary, if you do not think he will be well cared for by those about him, I will go for you." "You?" Barbara's dark eyes dilated with sudden fear--"Oh! no, not you!----" "Indeed, you could trust me to do all that was possible. You do not think, surely, that your actual presence would be welcome to him?" The words were uttered very quietly, but, as he asked the apparently indifferent question, Berwick clenched the stick he held with a nervous movement. "No, I should not be personally welcome." Barbara spoke in a low voice, almost in a whisper; she felt it impossible to make those confidences regarding her life with Pedro Rebell which another woman would, perhaps, in her place, have been eager to make. And yet she longed to convey to Berwick how short-lived on his part had been the sudden attraction which had led this half-Spaniard to behave, in those sad weeks just before and after her father's death, so as to bring her to believe that marriage with him was the only way out of a difficult and undignified situation; how little, when once he was married to her, the man who was now dying had taken her into his scheming, vicious life.