She raised her head, her lips parted in a smile, her eyes dreamily gazing at the strip of sunlit green outside her window. There he had stood; thence he had turned away so mournfully, and now he was to come back. _To come back_! Would he not read between the lines of the oddly composed missive—would not the very words have for him a deeper meaning than their guileless originator guessed at—would he not come flying to her side? In a few days—in little more than a few hours, perhaps, he would be with her; and then! She gave a sudden gasp, and flung herself forward across the table. And then! In a moment the web of self-deception with which she had been endeavouring to cloak the situation was torn to shreds, and she saw the truth. A crisis was impending: it was folly to pretend that it would take her unawares, it was worse than folly to endeavour to shift the responsibility to poor unsuspicious Isaac. If Richard returned the struggle would have to be gone through again: it would be even harder than before, for she would have lured him back after he had broken from her. If thus sorely tempted and wrongfully encouraged he were to speak those words which she had seen so often trembling on his lips, what answer could she make? Could she look him in the face and affect unconsciousness, or—what did she mean to do? Did she mean to keep her plighted troth as an honest woman should, or did she mean to cast aside, for good and all, truth, and honour, and self-respect, and jilt the man who had been her faithful friend? ‘I want to do right,’ said Rosalie, with another gasping sigh. ‘I have never told a lie in my life; I won’t tell one now; I won’t act one either. If he comes back it will only be on false pretences; he must n’t be allowed to come back.’ She lay still for a moment, her arms extended, a kind of tremor passing every now and then over her frame. Presently she said again, half aloud: ‘I won’t be deceitful; I won’t break my word; but oh, how hard it is to do right! God help me.’ She straightened herself all at once, and pushed back the hair from her forehead; then, drawing the blotter towards her, wrote a hasty line on a sheet of paper—‘Do not come back, I implore you. R. F.’—thrust it into an envelope, and directed it to Richard. With little convulsive sobs at intervals she went upstairs, bathed her swollen eyes, and put on her hat. There was no one about the Down Farm when she approached it, but, on entering, she almost fell over a strapped portmanteau that had been placed just inside the doorway. As she recovered herself Bithey appeared at the kitchen door. ‘I thought you was the carrier,’ she remarked. ‘Master did say as he ’d sent for him to fetch that there box o’ Richard Marshall’s. ’T is to go to Liverpool to-day.’ ‘Is Mr. Sharpe in?’ asked Rosalie falteringly. Somehow the sight of that portmanteau made her turn suddenly faint.