"No--You can't--you're too young. You don't know--I have a right to speak here, I know him--I have known him all this time----" Lizzie broke off. Rachel, suddenly looking up, gazed at her--Lizzie, fiercely, also proudly as though she were guarding something very precious that they were trying to take from her, returned her gaze. "All this time," Rachel said slowly. "You've known him--of course ... at Saxton Square...." Then, as though the revelation had suddenly broken upon her, "Why you--you----!" "Yes," said Lizzie, now fiercely indeed, hurling back at the girl the _naivete_ of her surprise. "Yes--it's odd, isn't it? I'm not the kind of woman, am I, ever to care for a man, or to have a man care for me?--To have any feeling or desire or affection. But it is not so strange as it may seem--I love him every bit as well as you do--I've cared more patiently perhaps, more unselfishly even. But there it is ... it gives me the right." Nothing more surprising than that on this special circumstance Rachel had never reckoned. Feeling it now, blazing there before her, the way that she was to deal with it was beyond her experience. In an instant Lizzie Rand was, to her, a new creature. Always she had seen Lizzie patiently, with method, with discipline, putting things in order--that was her world and dominion. Lizzie had appeared, to Rachel, to stand for all the things that she herself was not. Rachel had often envied that absence of emotion, that security from impulse and passion, and it was upon that very security that Rachel had wished to depend. It was that that had driven her to seek Lizzie's friendship. She herself so unsure, so caught and destroyed by powers too potent for her resistance, had looked with wonder and desire upon Lizzie's safety-- Now Lizzie Rand was no longer Lizzie Rand. She was of Rachel's number, she might, as easily as Rachel, be swept, whirled away,--after death and destruction. But there was more than that. There was the realization that Lizzie must hate her, that Lizzie was the last person in the world to whom she should have given her confidence, that Lizzie would fight now to the last breath in her body to keep Francis Breton from her. During a long silence they sat facing one another--the little room was now nearly dark and it was only by the faint pale shadow from the sky beyond the window that they could catch, each from each, their consciousness of their new relationship. It was during that silence that Lizzie was again aware that her ears were straining to catch some sound.... "I didn't know," Rachel said at last very softly; "it must seem brutal to you now that I should have told you all this. I wouldn't of course have spoken."