“Then let him await mine!” exclaimed Rachel, in a vindictive voice for which she was apologizing in the next breath.  “I owe you much,” she added, “if only for your kindness and sympathy during these few minutes.  But to him I owe nothing that I cannot pay in cash.  He tried to keep me from telling my own story in the box—­they all did—­but he was the worst of all.  So I certainly do not owe him my life.  He came to me and he said what he liked; he may have forgotten what he said, but I never shall.”

“He would be the first to admit his error now.”

“Perhaps; but he believed me guilty to the very end; and I utterly refuse to see him to-night.”

“Then I shall tell him so.”

And the good doctor disappeared for the nonce, but was back in a couple of minutes, full of the lawyer’s expostulations.  What did Mrs. Minchin intend to do?  Where did she propose to go?  There were a hundred matters for explanation and arrangement.  Her solicitor said she had no friends, and seemed himself most anxious to act in that capacity.  Rachel’s lips curled at the thought.

“At least,” said she, “I have the friends who guaranteed his bill, if that has anything to say to his anxiety!  But what I mean to do and where I may go, are entirely my own affair.  And as for the hundred matters he mentions, he might have spoken of them during the week.  Perhaps he thought it would be waste of breath, but I should have appreciated the risk.”

So her solicitor was beaten off, with all the spirit which was one of Rachel’s qualities, but also with the rashness which was that quality’s defect.  The man was indeed no ornament to his profession, but a police-court practitioner of the pushing order, who had secured the case for notoriety and nothing else.  Rachel’s soul sickened when she thought of her interviews, and especially her most recent interviews, with one whom she had never seen before her trouble, and whom she devoutly hoped never to see again.  She did not perceive that the time had come when the lawyer might have been really useful to her.  Yet his messages left her more alive to the difficulties that lay before her as a free woman, and to the immediate necessity of acting for herself once more.

After all there had been a silver lining to the cloud under which she had lain so long.  Others had acted for her.  It had been a rest.  But, conscious of her innocence, and serene in that consciousness, she had prepared herself rather for another life than for a new lease of this one; and, while seeking to steel her soul to the awful sequel of a conviction, in the other direction she had seldom looked beyond the consummate incident of an acquittal.  Life seems a royal road when it is death that stares one in the face; but already Rachel saw the hills and the pitfalls; for indeed they began under her nose.

She had no plans, nor a single soul to help her to make any.  In all the world she had no real friend.  And yet, with the very independence to which this isolation was largely due, she must pick and choose, and reject, in the hour when any friend would have been better than none!