"I told you--I can't always help it. I'm a fool, I suppose--but--" Then she threw her arms round his neck--murmuring in his ear: "You'll have time to think--when you're away from me--that it was a great pity--you ever asked me." He kissed and scolded her, till she smiled again. Afterwards she made a strong effort to discuss the thing reasonably. Of course he must go--it would be a great opening--a great experience. And they would have all the more time to consider their own affairs. But all the evening afterwards he felt in some strange way that he had struck her a blow from which she was trying in vain to rally. Was it all the effect of her suffering at that brute's hands--aided by the emotion and strain of the recent scenes between herself and him? As for her, when she turned back from the gate where she had bid him good-bye, she saw Janet in the doorway waiting for her almost with a sense of exasperation. She had not yet said one word to Janet. That plunge was all to take! XIV Rachel woke the following morning in that dreary mood when all the colour and the glamour seem to have been washed out of life, and the hopes and dreams which keep up a perpetual chatter in every normal mind are suddenly dumb. How was she going to face Ellesborough's long absence? It had been recently assumed between them that he would be very soon released from his forestry post, that the infantry commission he had been promised would come to nothing, now the Armistice was signed, and that in a very few weeks they would be free to think only of themselves and their own future. This offer of Intelligence work at the American Headquarters had changed everything. In ten days, if nothing happened, he would be gone, and she would be left behind to grapple alone with Roger--who might at any moment torment her again; with the presence of Dempsey, who was thinking of settling in the village, and for whom she would be called upon very soon to fulfil the hopes she had raised in him; and finally, with the struggle and misery in her own mind. But something must happen. As she was dressing by candle-light in the winter dawn, her thoughts were rushing forward--leaping some unexplored obstacles lying in the foreground--to a possible marriage before Ellesborough went to France; just a quiet walk to a registry office, without any fuss or any witness but Janet. If she could reach that haven, she would be safe; and this dumb fever of anxiety, this terrified conviction that in the end Fate would somehow take him from her, would be soothed away.