“No, no!” she cried, turning from him. “I want to be alone, I must be alone, I’m too utterly wretched for words. It’s all of no use, I can’t stand this life out here; it will just kill me--it isn’t life, it is only existence, and such an existence too! I must have been mad to come--I was mad, every one was against it--my mother and father and friends, all of them. But I didn’t know what I was coming to--how could any one know?--how could I picture to myself the desolation and the deadness and the dull monotony, and the absence of everything picturesque, and the barren country, which at its best can never be comforting? I hate those mountains there, I could shake them, and I could go out and tread down all those wretched rows of wretched little trees--it’s all an absurd mockery of a life, it’s starvation from beginning to end. You just feel that there is nothing to live for, and you cry out the whole time to be done with it. Yes, I was mad, mad to leave everything and come--I can see it well enough now, when it is too late. But it was little enough you told me in your letters. Why didn’t you make me understand clearly what I was coming to? And yet you did try--I remember you tried; but how could any one ever describe the awful desolation? Oh, it’s simply heartbreaking. And to think it has to continue month after month, and year after year, and that there is no escape from it. How shall I ever bear myself? How can I possibly go on, drudging all the day long? For that is what the life out here means to a woman--drudgery and desolation, and it is wickedly cruel.” Robert Strafford stood there paralysed. [Illustration: “ROBERT PASSED NOISELESSLY OUT OF THE HOUSE.”] “And such an unattractive place to settle in,” she continued wildly, “when there are entrancing parts of the country near at hand: I saw them myself on the journey. If you had to come, why not have chosen a spot worth living in, where some kind of social existence was possible, instead of burying yourself in a wilderness like this? But nothing could ever make up to one for all one had lost, and if I were a man, I would rather starve at home in my old career than cut myself off from the throb and pulsation of a fuller life. Yes, indeed I would, and to-morrow I would turn my face homewards and thank God that I had freed myself at last, in spite of every one and everything, freed myself at last--oh God! when I think of it all....” Robert’s face was ashen. Twice he tried to speak, and his voice failed him. Then he said, quite quietly: “Never fear, Hilda, you shall have your freedom.” He opened the door, and passed noiselessly out of the house. CHAPTER X A STRICKEN MAN