But Rachel said more urgently--"No, don't go now. Even though you don't care, even though you hate me, help me. I've no one else. If only you knew the things I've suffered these past weeks, how I've hated myself for my indecision, for my weakness and shame. I don't know why I feel as though you were the only person to whom I could talk. I'm being driven, I suppose, by this long silence--and then you're so absolutely to be trusted--even though you dislike me--you're straight all through--I've always known that." At Lizzie's heart again now that strange confusion of sensation, and with it a sure conviction that fate had this scene between them in hand, and that events now, whatever the hours might bring forth, were beyond her control. "Yes, you may trust me," she said drily--"I'm useful, at any rate for that." Lizzie watched her as, in the little pause that followed, Rachel struggled for concentration and for the point of view that would make the strongest appeal. _That_, Lizzie grimly knew, was the thing for which the girl was struggling and it yielded her the pleasanter irony because she was, herself, so surely aware of that one fact that all Rachel's confessions contained-- For herself she had only confidently to sit and wait.... Then Rachel plunged-- "I'm unhappy," she said, "in my married life, miserably unhappy, and entirely, utterly by my own fault. I've tried, or fancied that I've tried. I've done what I've thought was my best--Things have happened now, at last, that have made it impossible--I can't go on any longer." She spoke as though she were, very urgently, endeavouring to deliver a fair honest statement. There was in her voice a note that showed that life had truly, of late, been very hard for her-- "I married, in the beginning, for a wrong reason. I knew then that I didn't love my husband. I married because I wanted to escape. I had always hated my grandmother and she had always hated me--you knew that, Miss Rand; everyone who had anything to do with us knew it. She had done more than hate me, she had made me frightened--frightened of life and people. Someone came along who was kind and easy and comfortable, and everyone said it would be a good thing, and so I, not because I loved him, but because I wanted to escape from my grandmother, married him. Because I had to silence everything that was honest in me I'm paying now." "It was all quite natural," Lizzie said. "Most women would have done the same." "It was horrible from the beginning; I found that I had not escaped from my grandmother at all. She had arranged the marriage and now was always, and in some curious way, influencing it.