The two girls had sobbed themselves to sleep at last. But Janet did not sleep. Tears came naturally as the hours went by--tears and the agonized relief of prayer to one for whom prayer was a daily need of the soul. And in the early morning there flooded in upon her a strange consciousness of Rachel's spirit in hers--a strange suspicion that after all the gods had not wrought so hardly with Rachel. A few days before she had attended the funeral in the village church, of a young wife just happily married, who had died in three days, of virulent influenza. Never had the words of the Anglican service pleased her so little. What mockery--what fulsome mockery--to thank God because "it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister, out of the miseries of this troublesome world." But the words recurred to her now--mysteriously--with healing power. Had it been after all "deliverance" for Rachel, from this "troublesome world," and the temptations that surround those who are not strong enough for the wrestle that Fate sets them--that a God appoints them? She had met her lover--after fear and anguish; and had known him hers, utterly and wholly hers, for one supreme moment. And from that height--that perfection--God had called her. No lesser thing could ever touch her now. Such are the moments of religious exaltation which cheat even the sharpest griefs of men and women. Janet would decline from her Pisgah height only too soon; but, for the time, thoughts like these gave her the strength to bear. When the house began to move again, she went down to Ellesborough. She drew him into the kitchen--made a fire, and brought him food. Presently she found calm enough to tell him many details of the previous days. And the man's sound nature responded. Once he grasped her hand, and kissed it--as though he thanked her dumbly again, for himself and Rachel. It seemed to Janet indeed, as she sat by him, that Rachel had left her a trust. She took it up instinctively--from this first desolate morning. For there are women set apart for friendship--Janet was one of them--as others are set apart for love. * * * * * And with the first break of light on the new November day, the search parties in the hills came upon what they sought. Some one remembered the deserted hut--and from that moment the hunt was easy. Finally in the dripping heart of the wood the pursuers found the murderer lying face downwards in front of the dead fire, with the revolver beside him with which he had taken first Rachel's life, and then his own. Some sheets of paper were scattered near him, on which he had written an incoherent and grandiloquent confession. But of such acts there is no real explanation. They are the product of that black seed in human nature which is born with a man, and flowers in due time, through devious stages, into such a deed as that which destroyed Rachel Henderson.