'Rachel, perhaps you mean my mother--I have told her everything--she will receive you with all the respect you so well deserve; and with all her faults, she loves me, and will love you still more.' 'No, Lord Chelford, no.' She was pale now, and looking very sadly in his eyes. 'It is not that, but only that you must never, never speak of it again.' 'Oh! Rachel, darling, you must not say that--I love you so--so _desperately_, you don't know.' 'I can say nothing else, Lord Chelford. My mind is quite made up--I am inexpressibly grateful--you will never know how grateful--but except as a friend--and won't you still be my friend?--I never can regard you.' Rachel was so pale that her very lips were white as she spoke this in a melancholy but very firm way. 'Oh, Rachel, it is a great blow--maybe if you thought it over!--I'll wait any time.' 'No, Lord Chelford, I'm quite unworthy of your preference; but time cannot change me--and I am speaking, not from impulse, but conviction. This is our secret--yours and mine--and we'll forget it; and I could not bear to lose your friendship--you'll be my friend still--won't you? Good-bye.' 'God bless you, Rachel!' And he hurriedly kissed the hand she had placed in his, and without a word more, or looking back, he walked swiftly down the wooded road towards Gylingden. So, then, it had come and gone--gone for ever. 'Margery, bring the basket in; I think a shower is coming.' And she picked up her trowel and other implements, and placed them in the porch, and glanced up towards the clouds, as if she saw them, and had nothing to think of but her gardening and the weather, and as if her heart was not breaking. CHAPTER LIII. THE VICAR'S COMPLICATIONS, WHICH LIVELY PEOPLE HAD BETTER NOT READ. William Wylder's reversion was very tempting. But Lawyer Larkin knew the value of the precious metals, and waited for more data. The more he thought over his foreign correspondence, and his interview with Lake, the more steadily returned upon his mind the old conviction that the gallant captain was deep in the secret, whatever it might be. Whatever his motive--and he always had a distinct motive, though sometimes not easily discoverable--he was a good deal addicted now to commenting, in his confidential talk, with religious gossips and others, upon the awful state of the poor vicar's affairs, his inconceivable prodigality, the unaccountable sums he had made away with, and his own anxiety to hand over the direction of such a hopeless complication of debt, and abdicate in favour of any competent skipper the command of the water-logged and foundering ship. 'Why, his Brother Mark could get him cleverly out of it--could not he?' wheezed the pork-butcher. 'More serious than you suppose,' answered Larkin, with a shake of his head. 'It can't go beyond five hundred, or say nine hundred--eh, at the outside?'