Rachel Henderson raised herself and stood up.

"That's done with!" she said to herself, with a straightening of all her
young frame.

Yet all the way back to London she was tormented by thoughts of what she
had declared was "done with"; of scenes and persons, that is, which she
was determined to forget, and had just formally renounced for ever by her
symbolic action at the well.




II


"You do seem to have hit on a rather nice spot, Rachel, though lonesome,"
said Miss Henderson's friend and partner, Janet Leighton, as they stood
on the front steps of Great End Farm, surveying the scene outside, on an
August evening, about a week after she and Rachel had arrived with their
furniture and personal belongings to take possession of the farm.

During that week they had both worked hard--from dawn till dark, both
outside and in. The harvest was in full swing, and as the dusk was
filling, Janet Leighton, who had just returned herself from the fields,
could watch the scene going on in the wheat-field beyond the farm-yard,
where, as the reaping machine steadily pared away the remaining square of
wheat, two or three men and boys with guns lay in wait outside the square
for the rabbits as they bolted from their fast lessening shelter. The