She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an uncontrollable revulsion.

THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE

BY E.W. HORNUNG

ILLUSTRATED BY HARVEY T. DUNN

1906

TO MY FRIEND
EDWARD SHORTT

CONTENTS

[I. The End of Their Life]
[II. The Case for the Crown]
[III. Name and Nature]
[IV. The Man in the Train]
[V. The Man in the Street]
[VI. A Peripatetic Providence]
[VII. A Morning Call]
[VIII. The Dove and the Serpent]
[IX. A Change of Scene]
[X. A Slight Discrepancy]
[XI. Another New Friend]
[XII. Episode of the Invisible Visitor]
[XIII. The Australian Room]
[XIV. Battle Royal]
[XV. A Chance Encounter]
[XVI. A Match for Mrs. Venables]
[XVII. Friends in Need]
[XVIII. "They Which Were Bidden"]
[XIX. Rachel's Champion]
[XX. More Haste]
[XXI. Worse Speed]
[XXII. The Darkest Hour]
[XXIII. Dawn]
[XXIV. One Who Was Not Bidden]
[XXV. A Point to Langholm]
[XXVI. A Cardinal Point]
[XXVII. The Whole Truth]
[XXVIII. In the Matter of a Motive]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an uncontrollable revulsion.]

["I will!" she answered through her teeth—and she swept past him out of the room.]

["I'll tell you who I thought it was at first," said he, heartily.]

The Shadow of the Rope

CHAPTER I

THE END OF THEIR LIFE

"It is finished," said the woman, speaking very quietly to herself. "Not another day, nor a night, if I can be ready before morning!"

She stood alone in her own room, with none to mark the white-hot pallor of the oval face, the scornful curve of quivering nostrils, the dry lustre of flashing eyes. But while she stood a heavy step went blustering down two flights of stairs, and double doors slammed upon the ground floor.

It was a little London house, with five floors from basement to attic, and a couple of rooms upon each, like most little houses in London; but this one had latterly been the scene of an equally undistinguished drama of real life, upon which the curtain was even now descending. Although a third was whispered by the world, the persons of this drama were really only two.

Rachel Minchin, before the disastrous step which gave her that surname, was a young Australian lady whose apparent attractions were only equalled by her absolute poverty; that is to say, she had been born at Heidelberg, near Melbourne, of English parents more gentle than practical, who soon left her to fight the world and the devil with no other armory than a good face, a fine nature, and the pride of any heiress. It is true that Rachel also had a voice; but there was never enough of it to augur an income. At twenty, therefore, she was already a governess in the wilds, where women are as scarce as water, but where the man for Rachel did not breathe. A few years later she earned a berth to England as companion to a lady; and her fate awaited her on board.

Mr. Minchin had reached his prime in the underworld, of which he also was a native, without touching affluence, until his fortieth year. Nevertheless, he was a travelled man, and no mere nomad of the bush. As a mining expert he had seen much life in South Africa as well as in Western Australia, but at last he was to see more in Europe as a gentleman of means. A wife had no place in his European scheme; a husband was the last thing Rachel wanted; but a long sea voyage, an uncongenial employ, and the persistent chivalry of a handsome, entertaining, self-confident man of the world, formed a combination as fatal to her inexperience as that of so much poverty, pride, and beauty proved to Alexander Minchin. They were married without ceremony on the very day that they arrived in England, where they had not an actual friend between them, nor a relative to whom either was personally known. In the beginning this mattered nothing; they had to see Europe and enjoy themselves; that they could do unaided; and the bride did it only the more thoroughly, in a sort of desperation, as she realized that the benefits of her marriage were to be wholly material after all.

In the larger life of cities, Alexander Minchin was no longer the idle and good-humored cavalier to whom Rachel had learned to look for unfailing consideration at sea. The illustrative incidents may be omitted; but here he gambled, there he drank; and in his cups every virtue dissolved. Rachel's pride did not mend matters; she was a thought too ready with her resentment; of this, however, she was herself aware, and would forgive the more freely because there was often some obvious fault on her side before all was said. Quarrels of infinite bitterness were thus patched up, and the end indefinitely delayed.

In the meantime, tired of travelling, and impoverished by the husband's follies, the hapless couple returned to London, where a pure fluke with some mining shares introduced Minchin to finer gambling than he had found abroad. The man was bitten. There was a fortune waiting for special knowledge and a little ready cash; and Alexander Minchin settled down to make it, taking for the nonce a furnished house in a modest neighborhood. And here it was that the quarrelling continued to its culmination in the scene just ended.

"Not another day," said Rachel, "nor a night—if I can be ready before morning!"

Being still a woman with some strength of purpose, Mrs. Minchin did not stop at idle words. The interval between the slamming of doors below and another noise at the top of the house was not one of many minutes. The other noise was made by Rachel and her empty trunk upon the loftiest and the narrowest flight of stairs; one of the maids opened their door an inch.

"I am sorry if I disturbed you," their mistress said. "These stairs are so very narrow. No, thank you, I can manage quite well." And they heard her about until they slept.

It was no light task to which Rachel had set her hand; she was going back to Australia by the first boat, and her packing must be done that night. Her resolve only hardened as her spirit cooled. The sooner her departure, the less his opposition; let her delay, and the callousness of the passing brute might give place to the tyranny of the normal man. But she was going, whether or no; not another day—though she would doubtless see its dawn. It was the month of September. And she was not going to fly empty-handed, nor fly at all; she was going deliberately away, with a trunk containing all that she should want upon the voyage. The selection was not too easily made. In his better moods the creature had been lavish enough; and more than once did Rachel snatch from drawer or wardrobe that which remained some moments in her hand, while the incidents of purchase and the first joys of possession, to one who had possessed so little in her life, came back to her with a certain poignancy.

But her resolve remained unshaken. It might hurt her to take his personal gifts, but that was all she had ever had from him; he had never granted her a set allowance; for every penny she must needs ask and look grateful. It would be no fault of hers if she had to strip her fingers for passage-money. Yet the exigency troubled her; it touched her honor, to say nothing of her pride; and, after an unforeseen fit of irresolution, Rachel suddenly determined to tell her husband of her difficulty, making direct appeal to the capricious generosity which had been recalled to her mind as an undeniably redeeming point. It was true that he had given her hearty leave to go to the uttermost ends of the earth, and highly probable that he would bid her work her own way. She felt an impulse to put it to him, however, and at once.

She looked at her watch—it at least had been her mother's—and the final day was already an hour old. But Alexander Minchin was a late sitter, as his young wife knew to her cost, and to-night he had told her where he meant to sleep, but she had not heard him come up. The room would have been the back drawing-room in the majority of such houses, and Rachel peeped in on her way down. It was empty; moreover, the bed was not made, nor the curtains drawn. Rachel repaired the first omission, then hesitated, finally creeping upstairs again for clean sheets. And as she made his bed, not out of any lingering love for him, but from a sense of duty and some consideration for his comfort, there was yet something touching in her instinctive care, that breathed the wife she could have been.

He did not hear her, though the stairs creaked the smallness of the hour—or if he heard he made no sign. This discouraged Rachel as she stole down the lower flight; she would have preferred the angriest sign. But there were few internal sounds which penetrated to the little study at the back of the dining-room, for the permanent tenant was the widow of an eminent professor lately deceased, and that student had protected his quiet with double doors. The outer one, in dark red baize, made an alarming noise as Rachel pulled it open; but, though she waited, no sound came from within; nor was Minchin disturbed by the final entry of his wife, whose first glance convinced her of the cause. In the professor's armchair sat his unworthy successor, chin on waistcoat, a newspaper across his knees, an empty decanter at one elbow. Something remained in the glass beside the bottle; he had tumbled off before the end. There were even signs of deliberate preparations for slumber, for the shade was tilted over the electric light by which he had been reading, as a hat is tilted over the eyes.

Rachel had a touch of pity at seeing him in a chair for the night; but the testimony of the decanter forbade remorse. She had filled it herself in the evening against her husband's return from an absence of mysterious length. Now she understood that mystery, and her face darkened as she recalled the inconceivable insult which his explanation had embraced. No, indeed; not another minute that she could help! And he would sleep there till all hours of the morning; he had done it before; the longer the better, this time.

She had recoiled into the narrow hall, driven by an uncontrollable revulsion; and there she stood, pale and quivering with a disgust that only deepened as she looked her last upon the shaded face and the inanimate frame in the chair. Rachel could not account for the intensity of her feeling; it bordered upon nausea, and for a time prevented her from retracing the single step which at length enabled her to shut both doors as quietly as she had opened them, after switching off the light from force of habit. There was another light still glowing in the hall, and, again from habit, Rachel put it out also before setting foot upon the stairs. A moment later she was standing terror-stricken in the dark.

It was no sound from the study, but the tiniest of metallic rattles from the flap of the letter-box in the front door. The wind might have done it, for the flap had lost its spring; and, though the noise was not repeated, to the wind Rachel put it down, as she mounted the stairs at last in a flutter that caused her both shame and apprehension. Her nerve was going, and she needed it so! It should not go; it should not; and as if to steady it, she opened the landing window, and spent some minutes gazing out into the cool and starry night. Not that she could see very far. The backs of houses hid half the stars in front and on either hand, making, with the back of this house and its fellows, a kind of square turned inside out. Miserable little gardens glimmered through an irregular network of grimy walls, with here and there a fair tree in autumnal tatters; but Rachel looked neither at these nor at the stars that lit them dimly. In a single window of those right opposite a single lamp had burnt all night. It was the only earthly light that Rachel could see, the only one of earth or heaven upon which she looked; and she discovered it with thanksgiving, and tore her eyes away from it with a prayer.

In time the trunk was packed, and incontinently carried downstairs, by an effort which left Rachel racked in every muscle and swaying giddily. But she could not have made much noise, for still there was no sign from the study. She scarcely paused to breathe. A latchkey closed the door behind her very softly; she was in the crisp, clean air at last.

But it was no hour for finding cabs; it was the hour of the scavenger and no other being; and Rachel walked into broad sunlight before she spied a solitary hansom. It was then she did the strangest thing; instead of driving straight back for her trunk, when near the house she gave the cabman other directions, subsequently stopping him at one with a card in the window.

A woman answered the bell with surprising celerity, and a face first startled and then incensed at the sight of Mrs. Minchin.

"So you never came!" cried the woman, bitterly.

"I was prevented," Rachel replied coldly. "Well?"

And the monosyllable was a whisper.

"He is still alive," said the woman at the door.

"Is that all?" asked Rachel, a catch in her voice.

"It is all I'll say till the doctor has been."

"But he has got through the night," sighed Rachel, thankfully. "I could see the light in his room from hour to hour, even though I could not come. Did you sit up with him all night long?"

"Every minute of the night," said the other, with undisguised severity in her fixed red eyes. "I never left him, and I never closed a lid."

"I am so sorry!" cried Rachel, too sorry even for renewed indignation at the cause. "But I couldn't help it," she continued, "I really could not. We—I am going abroad—very suddenly. Poor Mr. Severino! I do wish there was anything I could do! But you must get a professional nurse. And when he does recover—for something assures me that he will—you can tell him—"

Rachel hesitated, the red eyes reading hers.

"Tell him I hope he will recover altogether," she said at length; "mind, altogether! I have gone away for good, tell Mr. Severino; but, as I wasn't able to do so after all, I would rather you didn't mention that I ever thought of nursing him, or that I called last thing to ask how he was."

And that was her farewell message to the very young man with whom a hole-and-corner scandal had coupled Rachel Minchin's name; it was to be a final utterance in yet another respect, and one of no slight or private significance, as the sequel will show. Within a minute or two of its delivery, Rachel was on her own doorstep for the last time, deftly and gently turning the latchkey, while the birds sang to frenzy in a neighboring garden, and the early sun glanced fierily from the brass knocker and letter-box. Another moment and the door had been flung wide open by a police officer, who seemed to fill the narrow hall, with a comrade behind him and both servants on the stairs. And with little further warning Mrs. Minchin was shown her husband, seated much as she had left him in the professor's chair, but with his feet raised stiffly upon another, and the hand of death over every inch of him in the broad north light that filled the room.

The young widow stood gazing upon her dead, and four pairs of eyes gazed yet more closely at her. But there was little to gather from the strained profile with the white cheek and the unyielding lips. Not a cry had left them; she had but crossed the threshold, and stopped that instant in the middle of the worn carpet, the sharpest of silhouettes against a background of grim tomes. There was no swaying of the lissome figure, no snatching for support, no question spoken or unspoken. In moments of acute surprise the most surprising feature is often the way in which we ourselves receive the shock; a sudden and complete detachment, not the least common of immediate results, makes us sometimes even conscious of our failure to feel as we would or should; and it was so with Rachel Minchin in the first moments of her tragic freedom. So God had sundered whom God had joined together! And this was the man whom she had married for love; and she could look upon his clay unmoved! Her mind leapt to a minor consideration, that still made her shudder, as eight eyes noted from the door; he must have been dead when she came down and found him seated in shadow; she had misjudged the dead, if not the living. The pose of the head was unaltered, the chin upon the chest, the mouth closed in death as naturally as in sleep. No wonder his wife had been deceived. And yet there was something unfamiliar, something negligent and noble, and all unlike the living man; so that Rachel could already marvel that she had not at once detected this dignity and this distinction, only too foreign to her husband as she had learnt to know him best, but unattainable in the noblest save by death. And her eyes had risen to the slice of sky in the upper half of the window, and at last the tears were rising in her eyes, when they filled instead with sudden horror and enlightenment.

There was a jagged hole in the pane above the hasp; an upset of ink on the desk beneath the window; and the ink was drying with the dead man's blood, in which she now perceived him to be soaked, while the newspaper on the floor beside him was crisp as toast from that which it had hidden when she saw him last.

"Murdered!" whispered Rachel, breaking her long silence with a gasp. "The work of thieves!"

The policemen exchanged a rapid glance.

"Looks like it," said the one who had opened the door, "I admit."

There was a superfluous dryness in his tone; but Rachel no more noticed this than the further craning of heads in the doorway.

"But can you doubt it?" she cried, pointing from the broken window to the spilled ink. "Did you think that he had shot himself?"

And her horror heightened at a thought more terrible to her than all the rest. But the constable shook his head.

"We should have found the pistol—which we can't," said he. "But shot he is, and through the heart."

"Then who could it be but thieves?"

"That's what we all want to know," said the officer; and still Rachel had no time to think about his tone; for now she was bending over the body, her white hands clenched, and agony enough in her white face.

"Look! look!" she cried, beckoning to them all. "He was wearing his watch last night; that I can swear; and it has gone!"

"You are sure he was wearing it?" asked the same constable, approaching.

"Absolutely certain."

"Well, if that's so," said he, "and it can't be found, it will be a point in your favor."

Rachel sprang upright, her wet eyes wide with pure astonishment.

"In my favor?" she cried. "Will you have the goodness to explain yourself?"

The constables were standing on either side of her now.

"Well," replied the spokesman of the pair, "I don't like the way that window's broken, for one thing, and if you look at it you'll see what I mean. The broken glass is all outside on the sill. But that's not all, ma'am; and, as you have a cab, we might do worse than drive to the station before more people are about."

CHAPTER II

THE CASE FOR THE CROWN

It was years since there had been a promise of such sensation at the Old Bailey, and never, perhaps, was competition keener for the very few seats available in that antique theatre of justice. Nor, indeed, could the most enterprising of modern managers, with the star of all the stages at his beck for the shortest of seasons, have done more to spread the lady's fame, or to excite a passionate curiosity in the public mind, than was done for Rachel Minchin by her official enemies of the Metropolitan Police.

Whether these gentry had their case even more complete than they pretended, when the prisoner was finally committed for trial, or whether the last discoveries were really made in the ensuing fortnight, is now of small account—though the point provided more than one excuse for acrimony on the part of defending counsel during the hearing of the case. It is certain, however, that shortly after the committal it became known that much new evidence was to be forthcoming at the trial; that the case against the prisoner would be found even blacker than before; and that the witnesses were so many in number, and their testimony so entirely circumstantial, that the proceedings were expected to occupy a week.

Sure enough, the case was accorded first place in the November Sessions, with a fair start on a Monday morning toward the latter end of the month. In the purlieus of the mean, historic court, it was a morning not to be forgotten, and only to be compared with those which followed throughout the week. The prisoner's sex, her youth, her high bearing, and the peculiar isolation of her position, without a friend to stand by her in her need, all appealed to the popular imagination, and produced a fascination which was only intensified by the equally general feeling that no one else could have committed the crime. From the judge downward, all connected with the case were pestered for days beforehand with more or less unwarrantable applications for admission. And when the time came, the successful suppliant had to elbow every yard of his way from Newgate Street or Ludgate Hill; to pass three separate barriers held by a suspicious constabulary; to obtain the good offices of the Under Sheriff, through those of his liveried lackeys; and finally to occupy the least space, on the narrowest of seats, in a varnished stall filled with curiously familiar faces, within a few feet of the heavily veiled prisoner in the dock, and not many more from the red-robed judge upon the bench.

The first to take all this trouble on the Monday morning, and the last to escape from the foul air (shot by biting draughts) when the court adjourned, was a white-headed gentleman of striking appearance and stamina to match; for, undeterred by the experience, he was in like manner first and last upon each subsequent day. Behind him came and went the well-known faces, the authors and the actors with a semi-professional interest in the case; but they were not well known to the gentleman with the white head. He heard no more than he could help of their constant whisperings, and, if he knew not at whom he more than once had occasion to turn and frown, he certainly did not look the man to care. He had a well-preserved reddish face, with a small mouth of extraordinary strength, a canine jaw, and singularly noble forehead; but his most obvious distinction was his full head of snowy hair. The only hair upon his face, a pair of bushy eyebrows, was so much darker as to suggest a dye; but the eyes themselves were black as midnight, with a glint of midnight stars, and of such a subtle inscrutability that a certain sweetness of expression came only as the last surprise in a face full of contrast and contradiction.

No one in court had ever seen this man before; no one but the Under Sheriff learnt his name during the week; but by the third day his identity was a subject of discussion, both by the professional students of the human countenance, who sat behind him (balked of their study by the prisoner's veil), and among the various functionaries who had already found him as free with a sovereign as most gentlemen are with a piece of silver. So every day he was ushered with ceremony to the same place, at the inner end of the lowest row; there he would sit watching the prisoner, a trifle nearer her than those beside or behind him; and only once was his attentive serenity broken for an instant by a change of expression due to any development of the case.

It was not when the prisoner pleaded clearly through her veil, in the first breathless minutes of all; it was not a little later, when the urbane counsel for the prosecution, wagging his pince-nez at the jury, thrilled every other hearer with a mellifluous forecast of the new evidence to be laid before them. The missing watch and chain had been found; they would presently be produced, and the jury would have an opportunity of examining them, together with a plan of the chimney of the room in which the murder had been committed; for it was there that they had been discovered upon a second search instituted since the proceedings before the magistrates. The effect of this announcement may be conceived; it was the sensation of the opening day. The whole case of the prosecution rested on the assumption that there had been, on the part of some inmate of the house, who alone (it was held) could have committed the murder, a deliberate attempt to give it the appearance of the work of thieves. Thus far this theory rested on the bare facts that the glass of the broken window had been found outside, instead of within; that no other mark of foot or hand had been made or left by the supposititious burglars; whereas a brace of revolvers had been discovered in the dead man's bureau, both loaded with such bullets as the one which had caused his death, while one of them had clearly been discharged since the last cleaning. The discovery of the missing watch and chain, in the very chimney of the same room, was a piece of ideal evidence of the confirmatory kind. But it was not the point that made an impression on the man with the white hair; it did not increase his attention, for that would have been impossible; he was perhaps the one spectator who was not, if only for the moment, perceptibly thrilled.

Thrilling also was the earlier evidence, furnished by maid-servants and police constables in pairs; but here there was no surprise. The maids were examined not only as to what they had seen and heard on the night of the murder—and they seemed to have heard everything except the fatal shot—but upon the previous relations of their master and mistress—of which they showed an equally extensive knowledge. The constables were perforce confined to their own discoveries and observations when the maids had called them in. But all four witnesses spoke to the prisoner's behavior when shown the dead body of her husband, and there was the utmost unanimity in their several tales. The prisoner had exhibited little or no surprise; it was several minutes before she had uttered a syllable; and then her first words had been to point out that burglars alone could have committed the murder.

In cross-examination the senior counsel for the defence thus early showed his hand; and it was not a strong one to those who knew the game. A Queen's Counsel, like the leader for the Crown, this was an altogether different type of lawyer; a younger man, with a more engaging manner; a more brilliant man, who sought with doubtful wisdom to blind the jury with his brilliance. His method was no innovation at the Old Bailey; it was to hold up every witness in turn to the derision and contempt of the jury and the court. So both the maids were reduced to tears, and each policeman cleverly insulted as such. But the testimony of all four remained unshaken; and the judge himself soothed the young women's feelings with a fatherly word, while wigs were shaken in the well of the court. That was no road to the soft side of a decent, conscientious, hard-headed jury, of much the same class as these witnesses themselves; even the actors and authors had a sound opinion on the point, without waiting to hear one from the professional gentlemen in the well. But the man in front with the very white hair—the man who was always watching the prisoner at the bar—there was about as much expression of opinion upon his firm, bare face as might be seen through the sable thickness of her widow's veil.

It was the same next day, when, for some five hours out of a possible five and a half, the attention of the court was concentrated upon a point of obviously secondary significance. It was suggested by the defence that the watch and chain found up the study chimney were not those worn by the deceased at the time he met his death. The contention was supported by photographs of Alexander Minchin wearing a watch-chain that might or might not be of another pattern altogether; expert opinions were divided on the point; and experts in chains as well as in photography were eventually called by both sides. Interesting in the beginning, the point was raised and raised again, and on subsequent days, until all were weary of the sight of the huge photographic enlargements, which were handed about the court upon each occasion. Even the prisoner would droop in her chair when the "chain photograph" was demanded for the twentieth time by her own unflagging counsel; even the judge became all but inattentive on the point, before it was finally dropped on an intimation from the jury that they had made up their minds about the chains; but no trace of boredom had crossed the keen, alert face of the unknown gentleman with the snowy hair.

So the case was fought for Mrs. Minchin, tooth and nail indeed, yet perhaps with more asperity than conviction, and certainly at times upon points which were hardly worth the fighting. Yet, on the Friday afternoon, when her counsel at last played his masterstroke, and, taking advantage of the then new Act, put the prisoner herself in the witness-box, it was done with the air of a man who is throwing up his case. The truth could be seen at a glance at the clean-cut, handsome, but too expressive profile of the crushing cross-examiner of female witnesses and insolent foe to the police. As it had been possible to predict, from the mere look with which he had risen to his feet, the kind of cross-examination in store for each witness called by the prosecution, so it was obvious now that his own witness had come forward from her own wilful perversity and in direct defiance of his advice.

It was a dismal afternoon, and the witness-box at the Old Bailey is so situated that evidence is given with the back to the light; thus, though her heavy veil was raised at last, and it could be seen that she was very pale, it was not yet that Rachel Minchin afforded a chance to the lightning artists of the half-penny press, or even to the students of physiognomy behind the man with the white hair. This listener did not lean forward an inch; the questions were answered in so clear a voice as to render it unnecessary. Yet it was one of these questions, put by her own counsel, which caused the white-headed man to clap a sudden hand to his ear, and to incline that ear as though the answer could not come without some momentary hesitation or some change of tone. Rachel had told sadly but firmly of her final quarrel with her husband, incidentally, but without embarrassment, revealing its cause. A neighbor was dangerously ill, whom she had been going to nurse that night, when her husband met her at the door and forbade her to do so.

"Was this neighbor a young man?"

"Hardly more than a boy," said Rachel, "and as friendless as ourselves."

"Was your husband jealous of him?"

"I had no idea of it until that night."

"Did you find it out then?"

"I did, indeed!"

"And where had your husband been spending the evening?"

"I had no idea of that either—until he told me he had been watching the house—and why!"

Though the man was dead, she could not rid her voice of its scorn; and presently, with bowed head, she was repeating his last words to her. A cold thrill ran through the court.

"And was that the last time you saw him alive?" inquired counsel, his face lightening in ready apprehension of the thrill, and his assurance coming back to him on the spot, as though it were he who had insisted on putting his client in the box.

But to this there was no immediate answer; for it was here that the white-haired man raised his hand to his ear; and the event was exactly as he seemed to have anticipated.

"Was that the last time you saw your husband alive?" repeated Rachel's counsel, in the winning accents and with the reassuring face that he could assume without an effort at his will.

"It was," said Rachel, after yet another moment's thought.

It was then that the white-headed man dropped his eyes for once; and for once the thin, hard lines of his mouth relaxed in a smile that seemed to epitomize all the evil that was in his face, and to give it forth in one sudden sour quintessence.

CHAPTER III

NAME AND NATURE

The prisoner's evidence concluded with a perfectly simple if somewhat hesitating account of her own doings during the remainder of the night of her husband's murder. That story has already been told in greater detail than could be extracted even by the urbane but deadly cross-examiner who led for the Crown. A change had come over the manner in which Rachel was giving her evidence; it was as though her strength and nerve were failing her together, and henceforth the words had to be put into her mouth. Curiously enough, the change in Mrs. Minchin's demeanor was almost coincident with the single and rather sinister display of feeling upon the part of the white-haired gentleman who had followed every word of the case. On the whole, however, her story bore the stamp of truth; and a half-apologetic but none the less persistent cross-examination left it scarcely less convincing than before.

There was one independent witness for the defence, in addition to the experts in photography and chains. The landlady of the house at which Rachel called, in the early morning, on her way home with the cab, was about five minutes in the witness-box, but in those five minutes she supplied the defence with one of its strongest arguments. It was at least conceivable that a woman who had killed her husband might coolly proceed to pack her trunk, and thereafter fetch the cab which was to remove herself and her effects from the scene of the tragedy. But was it credible that a woman of so much presence of mind, to whom every minute might make the difference between life and death, would, having found her cab, actually drive out of her way to inquire after a sick friend, or even a dying lover, before going home to pick up her luggage and to ascertain whether her crime was still undetected? Suppose it were a lover, and inquire one must: would one not still leave those inquiries to the last? And having made them, last or first; and knowing the grim necessity of flight; would one woman go out of her way to tell another that she "had to go abroad very suddenly, and was going for good?"

"Inconceivable!" cried the prisoner's counsel, dealing with the point; and the word was much upon his lips during the course of a long and very strenuous speech, in which the case for the Crown was flouted from beginning to end, without, perhaps, enough of concentration on its more obvious weaknesses, or of respect for its undoubted strength. For the prisoner's proceedings on the night of the murder, however, supposing she had committed it, and still more on the morning after, it would have been difficult to find a better epithet; the only drawback was that this one had seen service in the cause of almost every murderer who ever went to the gallows—as counsel for the prosecution remarked in his reply, with deadly deference to his learned friend.

"On the other hand," he went on, wagging his eyeglasses with leisurely deliberation, and picking his words with a care that enhanced their effect, after the unbridled rhetoric of the defence—"on the other hand, gentlemen, if criminals never made mistakes, inconceivable or not as we may choose to consider them—if they never made those mistakes, they would never stand in that dock."

It was late on the Saturday afternoon when the judge summed up; but a pleasant surprise was in store for those who felt that his lordship must speak at greater length than either of the counsel between whom he was to hold the scales. The address from the bench was much the shortest of the three. Less exhaustive than the conventional review of a complicated case, it was a disquisition of conspicuous clearness and impartiality. Only the salient points were laid before the jury, for the last time, and in a nutshell, but with hardly a hint of the judge's own opinion upon any one of them. The expression of that opinion was reserved for a point of even greater import than the value of any separate piece of evidence. If, said the judge, the inferences and theory of the prosecution were correct; if this unhappy woman, driven to desperation by her husband, and knowing where he kept his pistols, had taken his life with one of them, and afterwards manufactured the traces of a supposititious burglary; then there was no circumstance connected with the crime which could by any possibility reduce it from murder to manslaughter. The solemnity of this pronouncement was felt in the farthest corner of the crowded court. So they were to find her guilty of wilful murder, or not guilty at all! Every eye sped involuntarily to the slim black figure in the dock; and, under the gaze of all, the figure made the least little bow—a movement so slight and so spontaneous as to suggest unconsciousness, but all the more eloquent on that account.

Yet to many in court, more especially to the theatrical folk behind the man with the white hair, the gesture was but one more subtle touch in an exhibition of consummate art and nerve.

"If they do acquit her," whispered one of these wiseacres to another, "she will make her fortune on the stage!"

Meanwhile the judge was dealing at the last with the prisoner's evidence in her own behalf, and that mercifully enough, though with less reticence than had characterized the earlier portions of his address. He did not think it possible or even desirable to forget that this was the evidence of a woman upon trial for her life. It must not be discredited on that account. But it was for the jury to bear in mind that the story was one which admitted of no corroboration, save in unimportant details. More than that he would not say. It was for them to judge of that story as they had heard it for themselves, on its own merits, but also in relation to the other evidence. If the jury believed it, there was an end of the case. If they had any reasonable doubt at all, the prisoner was entitled to the full benefit of that doubt, and they must acquit her. If, on the other hand, the facts taken together before and after the murder brought the jury to the conclusion that it was none other than the prisoner who had committed the murder—though, of course, no one was present to see the act committed—they must, in duty to their oaths, find her guilty.

During the judge's address the short November day had turned from afternoon to night, and a great change had come over the aspect of the dim and dingy court. Opaque globes turned into flaring suns; incandescent burners revealed unsuspected brackets; the place was warmed and lighted for the first time during the week. And the effect of the light and warmth was on all the faces that rose as one while the judge sidled from the bench, and the jury filed out of their box, and the prisoner disappeared down the dock stairs for the last time in ignorance of her fate. Next moment there was the buzz of talk that you expect in a theatre between the acts, rather than in a court of justice at the solemn crisis of a solemn trial. It was like a class-room with the master called away. Hats were put on again in the bulging galleries; hardly a tongue was still. On the bench a red-robed magnate and another in knee-breeches exchanged views upon the enlarged photographs which had played so prominent a part in the case; in the well the barristers' wigs nodded or shook over their pink blotters and their quill pens; gentlemen of the Press sharpened their pencils and indulged in prophecy; and on their right, between the reporters and the bench, the privileged few, the literary and theatrical elect, discussed the situation with abnormal callousness, masking emotion with a childlike cynicism of sentiment and phrase.

And for once the stranger in their midst, the man with more outward distinction than any one of them, the unknown man with the snowy hair, could afford to listen to what they had to say.

"No chance, my dear man. Not an earthly!"

"I'm not so sure of that."

"Will you bet?"

"No, hang it! What a beast you are! But I thought the woman was speaking the truth."

"You heard what the judge said. Where's your corroboration? No, they ought never to have let her go into the box. I hear she insisted. But it hasn't saved anybody yet."

"The new law? Then it shows her pluck!"

"But not necessarily her innocence, dear boy."

Thus one shaven couple. Others had already exhausted the subject.

"Yes, I finished it down at Westgate last week."

"Satisfied?"

"In a way. It depends so much on the cast."

"These actor-managers—what?"

"More or less. I must be off. Dining out."

"What! Not going to wait for the end of the fourth act?"

"No, I'm late as it is. Ta-ta!"

The white-haired man was amused. He did not turn round, nor, if he had, would he have known the retreating gentleman for the most eminent of living playwrights; but he knew the reason for his sudden retreat. A hush had fallen, and some one had whispered, "They're coming!" The light-hearted chatter had died away on the word; perhaps it was not so light-hearted after all. But the alarm was false, there was no sign of the jury, and the talk rose again, as the wind will in a storm.

"We shall want a glass when this is over," whispered one of the pair who had argued about the case.

"And we'll have it, too, old man!" rejoined his friend.

The white-haired man was grimly interested. So this was the way men talked while waiting to hear a fellow-creature sentenced to death! It was worth knowing. And this was what the newspaper men would call a low buzz—an expectant hush—this animated babble! Yet the air was charged with emotion, suppressed perhaps, but none the less distinguishable in every voice. Within earshot a perspiring young pressman was informing his friends that to come there comfortably you should commit the murder yourself, then they gave you the Royal Box; but his teeth could be heard chattering through the feeble felicity. The white-headed listener curled a contemptuous nostril. They could joke, and yet they could feel! He himself betrayed neither weakness, but sat waiting patiently and idly listening, with the same grim jaw and the same inscrutable eye with which he had watched the prisoner and the jury alternately throughout the week. And when the latter at last returned, and then the former, it was the same subtle stare that he again bent upon them both in turn.

The jury had been absent but forty minutes after all; and their expedition seemed as ill an omen as their nervous and responsible faces. There was a moment's hush, another moment of prophetic murmurs, and then a stillness worthy of its subsequent description in every newspaper. The prisoner was standing in the front of the dock, a female warder upon either hand. The lightning pencil of the new journalist had its will of her at last. For Mrs. Minchin had dispensed not only with the chair which she had occupied all the week, but also with the heavy veil which she had but partially lifted during her brief sojourn in the witness-box, and never once in the dock. The veil was now flung back over the widow's bonnet, peaking and falling like a sable cowl, against which the unearthly pallor of her face was whiter far then that of the merely dead, just as mere death was the least part of the fate confronting her. Yet she had raised her veil to look it fairly in the face, and the packed assembly marvelled as it gazed.

Was that the face that had been hidden from them all these days? It was not what they had pictured beneath the proud, defiant carriage of its concealing veil. Was that the face of a determined murderess?

Beautiful it was not as they saw it then, but the elements of beauty lay unmistable beneath a white mist of horror and of pain, as a lovely landscape is still lovely at its worst. The face was a thin but perfect oval, lengthened a little by depth of chin and height of forehead, as now also by unnatural emaciation and distress. The mouth was at once bloodless, sweet, and firm; the eyes of a warm and lustrous brown, brilliant, eloquent, brave—and hopeless!

Yes, she had no hope herself! It was plain enough at the first glimpse of the deadly white, uncovered face, in the cruel glare of gas. But it became plainer still as, with sad, unflinching eyes, she watched and listened while, for the last time, the jurymen answered to their names.

Now they were done. The foreman shifted nervously in his place. In the overstrain of the last dread pause, the crowded court felt hotter and lighter than ever. It seemed to unite the glare of a gin palace with the temperature of a Turkish bath.

"Gentlemen, are you greed upon your verdict?"

"We are."

"Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?"

"Not guilty."

There was a simultaneous gasp from a hundred throats—a distinct cry from some. Then the Clerk of Arraigns was seen to be leaning forward, a hand to his ear, for the foreman's voice had broken with excitement. And every soul in court leaned forward too.

But this time his feelings had a different effect upon the excited foreman.

"Not guilty!" he almost bawled.

Dead silence then, while the clock ticked thrice.

"And that is the verdict of you all?"

"Of every one of us!"

The judge leant back in his place, his eyes upon the desk before him, without a movement or a gesture to strike the personal note which had been suppressed with such admirable impartiality throughout the trial. But it was several moments before his eyes were lifted with his voice.

"Let her be discharged," was all he said even then; but he would seem to have said it at once gruffly, angrily, thankfully, disgustedly, with emotion, and without any emotion at all. You read the papers, and you take your choice.

So Rachel Minchin was supported from the court before the round eyes of a hundred or two of her fellow-creatures, in the pitiable state of one who has been condemned to die, and not set free to live. It was as though she still misunderstood a verdict which had filled most faces with incredulity, but none with an astonishment to equal her own. Her white face had leaped alight, but not with gladness. The pent-up emotion of the week had broken forth in an agony of tears; and so they half led, half carried her from the court. She had entered it for the last time with courage enough; but it was the wrong kind of courage; and, for the one supreme moment, sentence of life was harder to bear than sentence of death.

In a few minutes the court was empty—a singular little theatre of pale varnish and tawdry hangings, still rather snug and homely in the heat and light of its obsolete gas, and with as little to remind one of the play as any other theatre when the curtain is down and the house empty. But there was clamor in the corridors, and hooting already in the street. Nor was the house really empty after all. One white-haired gentleman had not left his place when an attendant returned to put out the lights. The attendant pointed him out to a constable at the door; both watched him a few moments. Then the attendant stepped down and touched him on the shoulder.

The gentleman turned slowly without a start. "Ah, you're the man I want to see," said he. "Was that the Chief Warder in the dock?"

"Him with the beard," said the attendant, nodding.

"Well, give him this, and give it him quick. I'll wait up there till he can see me."

And he pressed his card into the attendant's palm, with a couple of sovereigns underneath.

"Wants to see the Chief Warder," explained the attendant to the constable at the door.

"He's been here all the week," mused the constable aloud. "I wonder who he is?"

"Name of Steel," whispered the other, consulting the card, as the gentleman advanced up the steps toward them, the gaslight gleaming in his silver hair, and throwing his firm features into strong relief.

"And not a bad name for him," said the constable at the door.

CHAPTER IV

THE MAN IN THE TRAIN

Rachel fought her weakness with closed eyes, and was complete mistress of herself when those about her thought that consciousness alone was returning. She recognized the chamber at a glance; it was the one in which generations of metropolitan malefactors, and a few innocent persons like herself, had waited for the verdict of life or death. For her it was life, life, life! And she wondered whether any other of the few had ever come back to life with so little joy.

The female warders were supporting her in a chair; the prison doctor stood over her with a medicine glass.

"Drink this," said he, kindly.

"But I have been conscious all the time."

"Never mind. You need it."

And Rachel took the restorative without more words.

It did its work. The color came back to her face. The blood ran hot in her veins. In a minute she was standing up without assistance.

"And now," said Rachel, "I shall not trespass further on your kindness, and I am sure that you will not wish to detain me."

"We cannot," said the doctor, with a broad smile and a bow; "you are as free as air, and will perhaps allow me to be the first to congratulate you. At the same time, my dear madam, and quite apart from your condition—which is wonderful to me after what you've been through—at the same time, and even with your fortitude, I think it would be advisable to—to wait a little while."

The doctor raised his eyes, and all at once Rachel heard. Overheard—outside—in the world—there was the brutal hooting of a thoughtless mob.

"So that is for me!"

Rachel set her teeth.

"On the contrary," said the kindly doctor, "it may be for the witnesses; but crowds are fickle things; and I should strongly urge you not to court a demonstration of one sort or the other. You are best where you are for the time being, or at all events somewhere within the precincts. And meanwhile your solicitor is waiting to add his congratulations to mine."

"Is he, indeed!" cried Rachel, in a voice as hard as her eye.

"Why, to be sure," rejoined the other, taken somewhat aback. "There must be many matters for discussion between you, and he at least seems very anxious to discuss them. In fact, I may say that he is only awaiting my permission for an immediate interview."

"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!

In the first ten minutes of the new life which Rachel Minchin began with her acquittal, she had refused to see her own solicitor, and an unknown gentleman whose card was brought to her by the Chief Warder himself. With the card was a message which might have inspired confidence, and the same might be said of the address. But it was enough for Rachel that she knew no one of the name. The Chief Warder, one of the kindliest mortals, displayed no little irritation under her repeated refusals; but it was the agent, and not the principal, who was so importunate; and the message was not repeated once the former could be induced to bear Mrs. Minchin's answer. The Chief Warder did indeed return, but it was not to make any further reference to the mysterious Mr. Steel who had craved an interview with Mrs. Minchin. And now the good fellow was all smiles.

"Feeling more yourself?" said he; and, when Rachel said she was, he asked her to listen now; and there was nothing to listen to. "The coast's as clear as the Criminal Court," explained this pleasant official. "A closed cab did it, with an officer on the box; and I'll call you another as soon as you like."

Rachel rose at once.

"It was kind of you to let me stay so long," she said. "But I don't think I will take a cab, thank you, if there's an underground station within reach, and you will kindly tell me the way."

"There's Blackfriars Bridge within five minutes. But you will have more than you can carry—"

"I have nothing worth taking away with me," said Rachel, "except the things I stand up in; but you may give what I leave to any poor woman who cares to have them. And I hope you will accept this trifle for yourself, with my deep gratitude for all your kindness."

Indeed, the man had been kind, and his kindness would have continued to the last had the trial ended differently. Nevertheless, Rachel's trifle was a piece of gold, and one of her last. Nor was this pure generosity. There was an untold joy in being able to give again. It was the first real taste of freedom; and in another minute Rachel was free.

Oh, but what a miracle to hear her feet on the now deserted pavement, to see her breath in the raw November night, and the lights of Ludgate Hill beyond! Rachel raised her veil to see them better. Who would look for her afoot so near the scene of her late ordeal? And what did it matter who saw her and who knew her now? She was innocent; she could look the whole world in the face once more. Oh, to rub shoulders with the world again!

A cab came tinkling up behind her, and Rachel half thought of hailing it, and driving through the lighted town after all; but the hansom was occupied, and the impulse passed. She put down her veil and turned into the stream without catching a suspicious eye. Why should they suspect her? And again, what did it matter if they did?

"Trial an' verdic'! Trial an' verdic'! Acquittal o' Mrs. Minchin! Trial an' verdic'!"

Everybody was buying the damp, pink sheets. Rachel actually bought one herself; and overheard the opinion of the man in the street without a pang. So she might think herself lucky! But she did, she did; in the reaction that had come upon her with the first mouthful of raw air, in the intoxication of treading the outer world again, she thought herself the luckiest woman in London, and revelled rather than otherwise in the very considerations which had appalled her in the precincts of the court. How good, after all, to be independent as well as free! How great to drift with the tide of innocent women and law-abiding men, once more one of themselves, and not even a magnet for morbid curiosity! That would come soon enough; the present was all the more to be enjoyed; and even the vagueness of the immediate future, even the lack of definite plans, had a glamor of their own in eyes that were yet to have their fill of street lamps and shop windows and omnibuses and hansom cabs.

The policeman under the bridge was a joy in himself; he refreshed Rachel's memory as to the way, without giving her an unnecessary look; and he called her "madam" into the bargain! After all, it was not every policeman who had been on duty at the Old Bailey, nor one in many thousands of the population who had gained admission to the court.

Yet if Rachel had relieved the tedium of her trial by using her eyes a little more; if, for example, she had condescended to look twice at the handful of mere spectators beyond the reporters on her right, she could scarcely have failed to recognize the good-looking, elderly man who was at her heels when she took her ticket at Blackfriars Bridge. His white hair was covered by his hat, but the face itself was not one to be forgotten, with its fresh color, its small, grim mouth, and the deep-set glitter beneath the bushy eyebrows. Rachel, however, neither recognized nor looked again.

In a few minutes she had a better chance, when, having entered an empty compartment in the first class, she was joined by this gentleman as the train began to move.

Rachel hid herself behind the newspaper which she had bought, not that she had looked twice at her companion, but because at such close quarters, and in the comparatively fierce light of the first-class compartment, she was terribly afraid that he might look once too often at her. But this fear passed from her in the matchless fascination of reading and re-reading five words in the stop-press column:—"MINCHIN CASE—Verdict, Not guilty."

Not guilty! Not guilty! And to see it in print! Her eyes filled at the sight, and she dried them to gloat again. There were columns and columns about the case, embellished with not unskilful sketches of counsel addressing the jury, and of the judge in the act of summing up. But Rachel had listened to every word from all three; and the professional report was less full and less accurate than the one which she carried in her brain and would carry to her grave. Not that the speeches mattered now. It was no speech that had saved her; it was her own story, from her own lips, that the lawyers would have closed! Rachel forgave them now; she was almost grateful to them for having left it to her to save herself in spite of them all: so should her perfect innocence be impressed upon the whole country as on those twelve fair minds. And once more she pored upon the hurriedly added and ill-printed line which gave their verdict to the world, while the train stopped and started, only to stop and start again.

"And what do you think of it, madam?"

The voice came from the opposite corner of the compartment, and Rachel knew it for that of the gentleman who had jumped in at the last moment at Blackfriars Bridge. It was Charing Cross that they were leaving now, and the door had not opened at that station or the last. Rachel sat breathless behind her evening paper. Not to answer might be to fasten suspicion upon her widow's weeds; and, for all her right to look mankind in the face, she shrank instinctively from immediate recognition. Then in a clap came the temptation to discuss her own case with the owner of a voice at once confident and courtly, and subtly reminiscent of her native colony, where it is no affront for stranger to speak to stranger without introduction or excuse.

Rachel's hesitation lasted perhaps a couple of seconds, and then her paper lay across her lap.

"Of what?" she asked, with some presence of mind, for she had never an instant's doubt that the question referred to the topic of the hour.

"We were reading the same paper," replied the questioner, with perfect courtesy; "it only struck me that we might both be reading the same thing, and feeling equally amazed at the verdict."

"You mean in the Minchin case," said Rachel steadily, and without the least interrogation in her tone. "Yes, I was reading it, as I suppose everybody is. But I disagree with you about the verdict."

The young widow's manner was as downright as her words. There was a sudden raising of the bushy eyebrows in the opposite corner, a brief opening of the black eyes underneath.

"Pardon me," said the gentleman, breaking into a smile; "I was not aware that I had expressed an opinion on that point."

"I understood you were amazed," said Rachel, dryly.

"And are not you?" cried the other point-blank. "Do you mean to tell me that you were prepared for an acquittal?"

"I was prepared for anything," replied Rachel, returning a peculiarly penetrating stare with one at least as steady, and yet holding her breath for very fear lest this stranger had found her out, until his next words allayed the suspicion.

"Madam, have you followed the case?"

"Indeed I have," sighed honest Rachel.

"And as a woman you believe this woman innocent?"

"I do."

It was hard enough to say no more than that; but Rachel was very fresh from her great lesson in self-control.

"It is easy to see that you do not," she merely permitted herself to add.

"On the contrary," said he, with great precision; "on the contrary, my dear madam, I believe this poor lady to be as innocent as yourself."

Again their eyes were locked; again Rachel drew the only inference from so pointed a pronouncement, and yet again was the impression shaken by her companion's next words.

"But I really have no right to an opinion," said he; "since, unlike you, I cannot claim to have read the case. Nor is that the interesting thing now." The stations had come and gone, until now they were at Victoria. The speaker looked out of the window, until they were off again, and off by themselves as before. "The interesting thing, to me, is not what this poor lady has or has not done, but what on earth she is going to do now!"

He looked at her again, and now Rachel was sure. But there was a kindness in his look that did away both with resentment and regret.

"They say she has literally no friends in England," he went on, with unconcealed concern. "That is incredible; and yet, if there be any truth in it, what a terrible position! I fear that everybody will not share your conviction, and, I may add, my own. If one can judge thus early by what one has heard and seen for oneself, this verdict is a personal disappointment to the always bloodthirsty man in the street. Then, God help the poor lady if he spots her! I only hope she will not give him a chance."

And now Rachel not only knew that he knew, but that he wished to apprise her of his knowledge without confessing it in so many words. So he would spare her that embarrassment, and would help her if he could, this utter stranger! Yet she saw it in his face, she heard it in his voice; and becoming gradually alive to his will to help her, as she instinctively was to his power, she had herself the will to consult one whose good intention and better tact were alike obvious. Mystery there was in her meeting with this man; something told her that it was no accident on his side; she began to wonder whether she had not seen him before; and while she wondered he came and sat opposite to her, and went on speaking in a lower voice, his dark eyes fixed on hers.

"If Mrs. Minchin wants a friend—and to-night I think she must—if ever she did or will! Well, if she does, I for one would be her friend—if she would trust me!"

The last words were the lowest of all; and in the tone of them there was a timbre which thrilled Rachel as the dark eyes fascinated her. She began to feel a strange repugnance—and yet more strange attraction. But to the latter her independence gave instant battle—a battle the easier to fight since the next station was Rachel's destination.

"Do you think she would trust me?" he almost whispered leaning towards her. "As a woman—don't you think she might?"

As Rachel hesitated the carriages began to groan beneath the brake; and her hesitation was at an end. So also was her limited capacity for pretence. She sat more upright in her corner, her shoulders fell in angles, and beneath the veil, which she had raised to read her paper, her eyes carried the war of interrogation into the enemy's country.

"I seem to have seen you before," said Rachel, cool of tongue but hot at heart.

"I think it very possible that you have."

"Were you at the trial?"

"From first to last!"

The pause that followed was really broken by the lights of Sloane Square station.

"You know me," said Rachel, hurriedly; "I have seen that for some time. May I ask if you are Mr. Steel?"

"I am."

"The Mr. Steel who sent me his card after the trial?"

Steel bowed.

"As a perfect stranger?"

"As a perfect stranger who had watched you for a whole long week in court."

Rachel ignored the relative clause.

"And because I would not see you, Mr. Steel, you have followed me, and forced yourself upon me!"

The train stopped, and Rachel rose.

"You will gather my motives when you recall our conversation," observed Steel; and he opened the door for her. But Rachel turned to him before alighting.

"Mr. Steel," said she, "I am quite sure that you mean kindly and well, and that I above all women should feel supremely grateful; but I cannot help thinking that you are unjust to the man in the street!"

"Better give him a trial," said Steel, coldly enough in his turn.

"I should prefer to," rejoined Rachel, getting out; and there was no little sting in the intonation of the verb; but Mr. Steel was left smiling and nodding very confidently to himself.

CHAPTER V

THE MAN IN THE STREET

Rachel's perturbation was only the greater from her success in concealing, or at least suppressing it, during the actual process of this singular interview. You may hold your breath without moving a muscle, but the muscles will make up for it when their turn comes, and it was so with Rachel and her nerves; they rose upon her even on the platform, and she climbed the many stairs in a tremor from head to foot. And at the top, in the open night, and at all the many corners of a square that is nothing of the kind, from hoarse throat and on fluttering placard, it was "Trial and Verdict," or "Sensational Verdict at the Old Bailey," here as at the other end of the town.

But now all Rachel's thoughts were of this mysterious Mr. Steel; of his inexplicable behavior towards her, and of her own attitude towards him. Yet, when all was said, or when all that had been said could be remembered, would his behavior be found so very inexplicable? Rachel was not devoid of a proper vanity, albeit that night she had probably less than most women with a tithe of her personal attractions; and yet upon reflection she could conceive but one explanation of such conduct in an elderly man.

"There is no fool like an old fool," quoted Rachel to herself; and it was remarkable that until this moment she had never thought of Mr. Steel as either elderly or old. His eyes were young; his voice was young; she could hear him and see him still, so the strong impression was not all on one side. No more, it would seem, was the fascination. Rachel, indeed, owned to no such feeling, even in her inmost heart. But she did begin to blame herself, alike for her reception of advances which might well have been dictated by mere eccentric benevolence, and for her readiness now to put another construction upon them. And all this time she was threading the streets of Chelsea at a pace suggestive of a destination and a purpose, while in her mind she did nothing but look back.

Impulsive by nature, Rachel had also the courage of each impulse while it lasted; on the other hand, if quick to act, she was only too ready to regret. Like many another whose self-reliance is largely on the surface, an achievement of the will and not the gift of a temperament, she usually paid for a display of spirit with the most dispiriting reaction; and this was precisely the case in point. Rachel was ashamed alike of her rudeness and her vanity; the latter she traced to its source. It was inspired by vague memories of other women who had been through the same ordeal as herself. One had been handed a bouquet in the dock; another had been overwhelmed by proposals of marriage. Rachel herself had received letters of which the first line was enough. But there had been no letter from Mr. Steel. Ah! but he had attended her trial; she remembered him now, his continual presence had impressed itself very subtly upon her mind, without the definite memory of a single glance; and after the trial he sent her his card, he dogged her in the train! What was she to think? There was the voice in which he had offered her his aid; there was the look in his eyes; there was the delicate indirectness of that offer.

A year or two ago, with all her independence, Rachel would not have been so ready to repel one whose advances, however unwarrantable in themselves, were yet marked by so many evidences of sympathy and consideration. She had not always been suspicious and repellent; and she sighed to think how sadly she must have changed, even before the nightmare of the last few weeks.

But a more poignant reminder of her married life was now in store for Rachel Minchin. She had come to Chelsea because it was the only portion of the town in which she had the semblance of a friend; but there did live in Tite Street a young couple with whom the Minchins had at one time been on friendly terms. That was in the day of plenty and extravagance; and the acquaintance, formed at an hotel in the Trossachs, had not ripened in town as the two wives could have wished. It was Mrs. Carrington, however, who had found the Minchins their furnished house, while her husband certainly interested himself in Rachel's defence. Carrington was a barrister, who never himself touched criminal work, but he had spoken to a friend who did, to wit the brilliant terror of female witnesses, and caustic critic of the police, to whom Rachel owed so little. But to Carrington himself she owed much—more indeed than she cared to calculate—for he was not a man whom she liked. She wished to thank him for his kindness, to give certain undertakings and to ask his advice, but it was Mrs. Carrington whom she really hoped to see. There was a good heart, or Rachel was much mistaken. They would have seen more of each other if Mrs. Carrington had had her way. Rachel remembered her on the occasion of the solitary visit she had received at Holloway—for Mrs. Carrington had been the visitor.

"Don't tell Jim," she had said, "when you get off and come to see us."

And she had kissed her captive sister in a way that made poor Rachel sometimes think she had a friend in England after all; but that was before her committal; and thereafter from that quarter not a word. It was not Mrs. Carrington whom Rachel blamed, however, and those last words of hers implied an invitation which had never been withdrawn. But invitation or no invitation, friend or no friend, Mrs. Carrington she would have to see. And even he would be different now that he knew she was innocent; and if it was easy to see what he had believed of her before, well, so much the more credit to him for what he had done.

So Rachel had decided before quitting the precincts of the Old Bailey; but her subsequent experiences in street and train so absorbed her that she was full of the interview that was over when she ought to have been preparing for the one still before her. And, in her absence of mind, the force of habit had taken advantage of her; instead of going on to Tite Street, she turned too soon, and turned again, and was now appalled to find herself in the very street in which her husband had met his death.

The little street was as quiet as ever; Rachel stood quite still, and for the moment she was the only person in it. She stole up to the house. The blinds were down, and it was in darkness, otherwise all was as she remembered it only too well. Her breath came quickly. It was a strange trick her feet had played her, bringing her here against her will! Yet she had thought of coming as a last resort. The furnished house should be hers for some months yet; it had been taken for six months from July, and this was only the end of November. At the worst—if no one would take her in—

She shuddered at the unfinished thought; and yet there was something in it that appealed to Rachel. To go back there, if only for the shortest time—to show her face openly where it was known—not to slink and hide as though she were really guilty! That might give her back her self-respect; that might make others respect her too. But could she do it, even if she would? Could she bring herself to set foot inside that house again?

Rachel felt tremulously in her pocket; there had been more keys than one, and that which had been in her possession when she was arrested was in it still. Nobody had asked her for it; she had kept it for this; dare she use it after all? The street was still empty; it is the quietest little street in Chelsea. There would never be a better chance.

Rachel crept up the steps. If she should be seen!

She was not; but a footstep rang somewhere in the night, and on that the key was fitted and the door opened without another moment's hesitation. Rachel entered, the door shut noisily behind her, and then her own step rang in turn upon the floor. It was bare boards; and as Rachel felt her way to the electric switches, beyond the dining-room door, her fingers missed the pictures on the walls. This prepared her for what she found when the white light sprang out above her head. The house had been dismantled; not a stick in the rooms, not so much as a stair-rod on the stairs, nor a blind to the window at their head.

The furniture removed while the use of it belonged legally to her! Had they made so sure of her conviction as all that? Rachel's blood came straight from zero to the boil; this was monstrous, this was illegal and wicked. The house was hers for other two months; and there were things of hers in it, she had left everything behind her. If they had been removed, then this outrage was little short of felony, and she would invoke the law from whose clutches she herself had escaped. Rachel had expected to be terrified in the house; she was filled insted with anger and indignation.

It was as she expected; not a trunk had been left; and the removal had taken place that very week. This would account for the electric light being still intact. Rachel discovered it by picking up a crumpled newspaper, which seemed to have contained bread and cheese; it did contain a report of the first day of the trial. They might have waited till her trial was over; they should suffer for their impatience, it was their turn. So angry was Rachel that her own room wounded her with no memories of the past. It was an empty room, and nothing more; and only on her return to the lower floor did that last dread night come back to her in all its horror and all its pitifulness.

The double doors of the late professor! Rachel forgot her grudge against his widow; she pulled the outer door, and pushed the inner one, just as she had done in the small hours of that fatal morning, but this time all was darkness within. She had to put on the electric light for herself. The necessity she could not have explained, but it existed in her mind; she must see the room again. And the first thing she saw was that the window was broken still.

Rachel looked at it more closely than she had done on the morning when she had given her incriminating opinion to the police, and the longer she looked the less reason did she see to alter that opinion. The broken glass might have been placed upon the sill in order to promote the very theory which had been so gullibly adopted by the police, and the watch and chain hidden in the chimney for the same purpose. They might have hanged the man who kept them; and surely this was not the first thief who had slunk away empty-handed after the committal of a crime infinitely greater than the one contemplated.

Rachel had never wavered in these ideas, but neither had she dwelt on them to any extent, and now they came one instant only to go the next. Her husband was dead—that was once more the paramount thought—and she his widow had been acquitted on a charge of murdering him. But for the moment she was thinking only of him, and her eyes hung over the spot where she had seen him sitting dead—once without dreaming it—and soon they filled. Perhaps she was remembering all that had been good in him, perhaps all that had been evil in herself; her lips quivered, and her eyes filled. But it was hard to pity one who was at rest, hard for her with the world to face afresh that night, without a single friend. The Carringtons? Well, she would see; and now she had a very definite point upon which to consult Mr. Carrington. That helped her, and she went, quietly and unseen as she had come.

There was still a light in the ground-floor windows of the Tite Street house, strong lights and voices; it was the dining-room, for the Minchins had dined there once; and the voices did not include a feminine one that Rachel could perceive. If there were people dining with them, the ladies must have gone upstairs, and Mrs. Carrington was the woman to see Rachel for five minutes, and the one woman in England to whom she could turn. It was an opportunity not to miss—she had not the courage to let it pass—and yet it required almost as much to ring the bell. And even as she rang—but not until that moment—did Rachel recognize and admit to herself the motive which had brought her to that door. It was not to obtain the advice of a clever man; it was the sympathy of another woman that she needed that night more than anything else in all the world.

She was shown at once into the study behind the dining-room, and immediately the voices in the latter ceased. This was ominous; it was for Mrs. Carrington that Rachel had asked; and the omen was instantly fulfilled. It was Mr. Carrington who came into the room, dark, dapper, and duskily flushed with his own hospitality, but without the genial front which Rachel had liked best in him. His voice also, when he had carefully shut the door behind him, was unnaturally stiff.

"I congratulate you," he said, with a bow but nothing more; and Rachel saw there and then how it was to be; for with her at least this man had never been stiff before, having indeed offended her with his familiarity at the time when her husband and he were best friends.

"I owe it very largely to you," faltered Rachel. "How can I thank you?"

Carrington said it was not necessary.

"Then I only hope," said Rachel, on one of her impulses, "that you don't disagree with the verdict?"

"I didn't read the case," replied Carrington glibly, and with neither more nor less of the contemptuous superiority with which he would have referred to any other Old Bailey trial; but the man himself was quick to see the brutality of such a statement, and quicker yet to tone it down.

"It wasn't necessary," he added, with a touch of the early manner which she had never liked; "you see, I knew you."

The insincerity was so obvious that Rachel could scarcely bring herself to confess that she had come to ask his advice. "What was the point?" he said to that, so crisply that the only point which Rachel could think of was the fresh, raw grievance of the empty house.

"Didn't your solicitor tell you?" asked Carrington. "He came to me about it; but I suppose—"

Rachel knew well what he supposed.

"He should have told you to-night," added Carrington, "at any rate. The rent was only paid for half the term—quite right—the usual way. The permanent tenant wanted to be done with the house altogether, and that entitled her to take her things out. No, I'm afraid you have no grievance there, Mrs. Minchin."

"And pray," demanded Rachel, "where are my things?"

"Ah, your solicitor will tell you that—when you give him the chance! He very properly would not care to bother you about trifles until the case against you was satisfactorily disposed of. By the way, I hope you don't mind my cigar? We were smoking in the next room."

"I have taken you from your guests," said Rachel, miserably. "I know I ought not to have come at such an hour."

Carrington did not contradict her.

"But there seemed so much to speak about," she went desperately on. "There are the money matters and—and—"

"If you will come to my chambers," said Carrington, "I shall be delighted to go into things with you, and to advise you to the best of my ability. If you could manage to come at half-past nine on Monday morning, I would be there early and could give you twenty minutes."

He wrote down the address, and, handing it to Rachel, rang the bell. This drove her to despair; evidently it never occurred to him that she was faint with weariness and hunger, that she had nowhere to go for the night, and not the price of a decent meal, much less a bed, in her purse. And even now her pride prevented her from telling the truth; but it would not silence her supreme desire.

"Oh!" she cried; "oh, may I not speak to your wife?"

"Not to-night, if you don't mind," replied Carrington, with his bow and smile. "We can't both desert our guests."

"Only for a minute!" pleaded Rachel. "I wouldn't keep her more!"

"Not to-night," he repeated, with a broader smile, a clearer enunciation, and a decision so obviously irrevocable that Rachel said no more. But she would not see the hand that he could afford to hold out to her now; and as for going near his chambers, never, never, though she starved!

"No, I wouldn't have kept her," she sobbed in the street; "but she would have kept me! I know her! I know her! She would have had pity on me, in spite of him; but now I can never go near either of them again!"

Then where was she to go? God knew! No respectable hotel would take her in without luggage or a deposit. What was she to do?

But while she wondered her feet were carrying her once more in the old direction, and as she walked an idea came. She was very near the fatal little street at the time. She turned about, and then to the left. In a few moments she was timorously knocking at the door of a house with a card in the window.

"It's you!" cried the woman who came, almost shutting the door in Rachel's face, leaving just space enough for her own.

"You have a room to let," said Rachel, steadily.

"But not to you," said the woman, quickly; and Rachel was not surprised, the other was so pale, so strangely agitated.

"But why?" she asked. "I have been acquitted—thanks partly to your own evidence—and yet you of all women will not take me in! Do you mean to tell me that you actually think I did it still?"

Rachel fully expected an affirmative. She was prepared for that opinion now from all the world; but for once a surprise was in store for her. The pale woman shifted her eyes, then raised them doggedly, and the look in them brought a sudden glow to Rachel's heart.

"No, I don't think that, and never did," said the one independent witness for the defence. "But others do, and I am too near where it happened; it might empty my house and keep it empty."

Rachel seized her hand.

"Never mind, never mind," she whispered. "It is better, ten thousand times, that you should believe in me, that any woman should! Thank you, and God bless you, for that!"

She was turning away, when she faced about upon the steps, gazing past the woman who believed in her, along the passage beyond, an unspoken question beneath the tears in her eyes.

"He is not here," said the landlady, quickly.

"But he did get over it?"

"So we hope; but he was at death's door that morning, and for days and weeks. Now he's abroad again—I'm sure I don't know where."

Rachel said good-night, and this time the door not only shut before she had time to change her mind again, but she heard the bolts shot as she reached the pavement. The fact did not strike her. She was thinking for a moment of the innocent young foreigner who had brought matters to a crisis between her husband and herself. On the whole she was glad that he was not in England—yet there would have been one friend.

And now her own case was really desperate; it was late at night; she was famished and worn out in body and mind, nor could she see the slightest prospect of a lodging for the night.

And that she would have had in the condemned cell, with food and warmth and rest, and the blessed certainty of a speedy issue out of all her afflictions.

It was a bitter irony, after all, this acquittal!

There was but one place for her now. She would perish there of cold and horror; but she might buy something to eat, and take it with her; and at least she could rest, and would be alone, in the empty house, the house of misery and murder, that was yet the one shelter that she knew of in all London.

She crept to the King's road, and returned with a few sandwiches, walking better in her eagerness to break a fast which she had only felt since excitement had given place to despair. But now it was making her faint and ill. And she hurried, weary though she was.

But in the little street itself she stood aghast. A crowd filled it; the crowd stood before the empty house of sorrow and of crime; and in a moment Rachel saw the cause.

It was her own fault. She had left the light burning in the upper room, the bedroom on the second floor.

Rachel joined the skirts of the crowd—drawn by an irresistible fascination—and listened to what was being said. All eyes were upon the lighted window of the bedroom—watching for herself, as she soon discovered—and this made her doubly safe where she stood behind the press.

"She's up there, I tell yer," said one.

"Not her! It's a ghost."

"Her 'usband's ghost, then."

"But vere's a chap 'ere wot sore 'er fice to fice in the next street; an' followed 'er and 'eard the door go; an' w'en 'e come back wiv 'is pals, vere was vat light."

"Let's 'ave 'er aht of it."

"Yuss, she ain't no right there."

"No; the condemned cell's the plice for 'er!"

"Give us a stone afore the copper comes!"

And Rachel saw the first stone flung, and heard the first glass break; and within a very few minutes there was not a whole pane left in the front of the house; but that was all the damage which Rachel herself saw done.

A hand touched her lightly on the shoulder.

"Do you still pin your faith to the man in the street?" said a voice.

And, though she had heard it for the first time that very evening, it was a voice that Rachel seemed to have known all her life.

CHAPTER VI

A PERIPATETIC PROVIDENCE

"Do you still pin your faith to the man in the street?"

It was Mr. Steel who stood at Rachel's elbow, repeating his question word for word; but he did not repeat it in the same tone. There was an earnest note in the lowered voice, an unspoken appeal to her to admit the truth and be done with proud pretence. And indeed the pride had gone out of Rachel at sight of him; a delicious sense of safety filled her heart instead. She was as one drowning, and here was a strong swimmer come to her rescue in the nick of time. What did it matter who or what he was? She felt that he was strong to save. Yet, as the nearly drowned do struggle with their saviours, so Rachel must fence instinctively with hers.

"I never did pin my faith to him," said she.

"Yet see the risk that you are running! If he turns round—if any one of them turns round and recognizes you—listen to that!"

It was only the second window, but a third and a fourth followed like shots from the same revolver. Rachel winced.

"For God's sake, come away!" he whispered, sternly.

And Rachel did come a few yards before a flicker of her spirit called a halt.

"Why should I run away?" she demanded, in sudden tears of mortification and of weakness combined. "I am innocent—so why should I?"

"Because they don't like innocent people; and there appear to be no police in these parts; and if you fall into their hands—well, it would be better for you if you had been found guilty and were safe and sound in Newgate now!"

That was exactly what Rachel had felt herself; she took a few steps more, but still with reluctance and irresolution; and once round the nearest corner, and out of that hateful street for ever, she turned to her companion in unconcealed despair.

"But what am I to do?" she cried. "But where am I to turn?"

"Mrs. Minchin," said Steel, "can you not really trust me yet?"

He stood before her under a street lamp, handsome still, upright for all his years, strong as fate itself, and surely kinder than any fate which Rachel Minchin had yet met with in the course of her short but checkered life. And yet—and yet—she trusted and distrusted him too!

"I can and I cannot," she sighed; and even with the words one reason occurred to her. "You have followed me, you see, after all!"

"I admit it," he replied, "and without a particle of shame. My dear lady, I was not going to lose sight of you to-night!"

"And why not?"

"Because I foresaw what might happen, and may happen still! Nay, madam, it will, if you continue to let your pride sit upon your common sense. Do you hear them now? That means the police, and when they're dispersed they'll come this way to King's Road. Any moment they may be upon us. And there's a hansom dropped from heaven!"

He raised his umbrella, the bell tinkled, the two red eyes dilated and widened in the night, then with a clatter the horse was pulled up beside the curb, and Steel spread his hand before the muddy wheel.

"Be sensible," he whispered, "and jump in! In a hansom you can see where you are going; in a hansom you can speak to the driver or attract the attention of any decent person on the sidewalk. Ah! you will trust me so far at last—I thank you from my heart!"

"Where to, sir?" asked the cabman through the roof.

And Rachel listened with languid curiosity; but that was all. She had put herself in this man's hands; resistance was at an end, and a reckless indifference to her fate the new attitude of a soul as utterly overtaxed and exhausted as its tired tenement of clay.

"Brook Street," said Steel, after a moment's pause—"and double-quick for a double fare. We shall be there in a quarter of an hour," he added reassuringly as the trap-door slammed, "and you will find everything ready for you, beginning with something to eat. I, at all events, anticipated the verdict; if you don't believe me, you will when we get there, for they have been ready for you all day. Do you know Claridge's Hotel, by the way?"

"Only by name," said Rachel, wearily.

"I'm glad to hear it," pursued Mr. Steel, "for I think you will be pleased. It is not like the ordinary run of hotels. Your rooms are your castle—regular self-contained flat—and you needn't see another soul if you don't like. I am staying in the hotel myself, for example, but you shall not set eyes on me for a week unless you wish to."

"But I don't understand," began Rachel, roused a little from her apathy. She was not suffered to proceed.

"Nor are you to attempt to do so," said her companion, "until to-morrow morning. If you feel equal to it then, I shall crave an audience, and you shall hear what I have got to say. But first, let me beg of you, an adequate supper and a good night's rest!"

"One thing is certain," said Rachel, half to herself: "they can't know who I am, or they never would have taken me in. And no luggage!"

"That they are prepared for," returned Steel; "and in your rooms you will find a maid who is also prepared and equipped for your emergency. As to their not knowing who you are at the hotel, there you are right; they do not know; it would have been inexpedient to tell them."

"Then at least," said Rachel, "I ought to know who I am supposed to be."

And she smiled, for interest and curiosity were awakened within her, with the momentary effect of stimulants; but Mr. Steel sat silent at her side. The cab was tinkling up Park Lane. The great park on the left, the great houses on the right, the darkness on the one hand, the lights on the other, had all the fascination of sharp contrasts—that very fascination which was Mr. Steel's. Rachel already discovered it in his face, and divined it in his character, without admitting to herself that there was any fascination at all. Yet otherwise she would have dropped rather than have done what she was doing now. The man had cast a spell upon her; and for the present she did feel safe in his hands. But with that unmistakable sense of immediate security there mingled a subtler premonition of ultimate danger, to which Rachel had felt alive from the first. And this was the keenest stimulus of all.

What was his intention, and what his object? To draw back was to find out neither; and to say the truth, even if she had not been friendless and forlorn, Rachel would have been very sorry to draw back now.

The raw air in her face had greatly revived her; the sights and lights of the town were still new and dear to her; she had come back to the world with a vengeance, to a world of incident and interest, with an adventure ready waiting to take her out of her past self!

But it was only her companion's silence which enabled Rachel to realize her strange fortune at this stage, and she had to put her question point-blank before she obtained any answer at all.

"If you insist upon hearing all the little details to-night," said Steele, with a good-humored shrug, "well, I suppose you must hear them; but I hope you will not insist. I have had to make provisions which you may very possibly resent, but I thought it would be time enough for us to quarrel about them in the morning. To-night you need rest and sustenance, but no excitement; of that God knows you have had enough! No one will come near you but the maid of whom I spoke; no questions will be put to you; everything is arranged. But to-morrow, if you feel equal to it, you shall hear all about me, and form your own cool judgment of my behavior towards you. Meanwhile won't you trust me—implicitly—until then?"

"I do," said Rachel, "and I will—until to-morrow."

"Then there are one or two things that I can promise you," said Steel, with the heartiness of a man who has gained his point. "You will not be compromised in any sort or kind of way; your self-respect shall not suffer; nothing shall vex or trouble you, if I can help it, while you remain at this hotel. And this I guarantee—whether you like it or not—unless you tell them, not a single soul in the place shall have the faintest inkling as to who you are. Now, only keep your why and wherefore till to-morrow," he concluded cheerily, "and I can promise you almost every satisfaction. But here we are at the hotel."

He thrust his umbrella outside, pointing to a portico and courtyard on the right; and in another moment Rachel was receiving the bows of powdered footmen in crimson plush, while Steel, hat in hand, his white hair gleaming in the electric light, led the way to the lift.

Rachel's recollection of that night was ever afterwards disjointed and involved as that of any dream; but there were certain features that she never forgot. There was the beautiful suite of rooms, filled with flowers that must have cost a small fortune at that time of year, and in one of them a table tastefully laid. Rachel remembered the dazzle of silver and the glare of napery, the hot plates, the sparkling wine, the hot-house fruit, and the deep embarrassment of sitting down to all this in solitary state. Mr. Steel had but peeped in to see that all was in accordance with his orders; thereafter not even a waiter was allowed to enter, but only Rachel's attendant, to whose charge she had been committed; a gentle and assiduous creature, quiet of foot and quick of hand, who spoke seldom but in a soothing voice, and with the delicate and pretty accent of the French-Swiss.

Rachel used to wonder whether she had shocked this mannerly young woman by eating very ravenously; she remembered a nervous desire to be done with that solitary repast, and to get to bed. Yet when she was there, in the sweetest and whitest of fine linen, with a hot bottle at her feet, and a fire burning so brightly in the room that the brass bedstead seemed here and there red-hot, then the sound sleep that she sorely needed seemed further off than ever, for always she dreamt she was in prison and condemned to die, till at length she feared to close her eyes. But nothing had been forgotten; and Rachel's last memory of that eventful day, and not less eventful night, was of a mild, foreign face bending over her with a medicine-glass and a gentle word.

And the same good face and the same soft voice were waiting for her when she awoke after many hours; the fire still burned brightly, also the electric-light, though the blind was up and the window filled with a dull November sky. It was a delicious awakening, recollection was so slow to come. Rachel might have been ill for days. She experienced the peace that is left by illness of sufficient gravity. But all she ailed was a slight headache, quickly removed by an inimitable cup of tea, that fortified her against the perplexing memories which now came swarming to her mind. This morning, however, enlightenment was due, and meanwhile Rachel received a hint, though a puzzling one, from the Swiss maid, as to the new identity which had been thrust upon her for the time being in lieu of her own.

"It was very sad for madame to lose all her things," cooed the girl, as she busied herself about the room.

"It was irritating," Rachel owned, beginning to wonder how much the other knew.

"But it was better than losing your life, madame!" the girl added with a smile.

And now Rachel lay silent. Could this amiable young woman know all? In one way Rachel rather hoped it was the case; it would be something to have received so much kindness and attention, even though bought and paid for, from one of her own sex who knew all there was to know, and yet did not shrink from her. But the young woman's next words dismissed this idea.

"When so many poor people were drowned!" said she. And the mystification increased.

Presently there was a knock at the outer door, which the maid answered, returning with Mr. Steele's card.

"Is he there?" asked Rachel, hastily.

"No, madame, but one of the servants is waiting for an answer. I think there is something written on the back, madame."

Rachel read the harmless request on the back of the card; nothing could have been better calculated to turn away suspicion of one sort or another, and there was obvious design in the absence of an envelope. But Rachel was not yet in the secret, and she was determined not to wait an hour longer than she need.

"What is the time, please?"

"I will see, madame."

The girl glided out and in.

"Well?"

"A quarter to ten, madame."

"Then order my breakfast for a quarter past, and let Mr. Steele be told that I shall be delighted to see him at eleven o'clock."

CHAPTER VII

A MORNING CALL

"The way to conceal one's identity," observed Mr. Steel, "is to assume another as distinctive as one's own."

This oracular utterance was confidentially delivered from the leathern chair at the writing-table, in an inner recess of Rachel's sumptuous sitting-room. The chair had been wheeled aloof from the table, on which were Steel's hat and gloves, and such a sheaf of book-stall literature as suggested his immediate departure upon no short journey, unless, indeed, the magazines and the Sunday newspapers turned out to be another offering to Mrs. Minchin, like the nosegay of hothouse flowers which she still held in her hand. Rachel herself had inadvertently taken the very easy-chair which was a further feature of the recess; in its cushioned depths she already felt at a needless disadvantage, with Mr. Steel bending over her, his strong face bearing down, as it were, upon hers, and his black eyes riddling her with penetrating glances. But to have risen now would have been to show him what she felt. So she trifled with his flowers without looking up, though her eyebrows rose a little on their own account.

"I know what you are thinking," resumed Steel; "that you had no desire to assume any new identity, or for a single moment to conceal your own, and that I have taken a great deal upon myself. That I most freely admit. And I think you will forgive me when you see the papers!"

"Is there so much about me, then?" asked Rachel, with a sigh of apprehension.

"A leading article in every one of them. But they will keep. Indeed, I would much rather you never saw them at all."

"Was that why you brought them in, Mr. Steel?"

The question was irresistible, its satire unconcealed; but Steel's disregard of it steered admirably clear of contempt.

"That was why I bought them, certainly," he admitted. "But I brought them with me for quite a different purpose, for which one would indeed have been enough. I was saying, however, that the best way to sink one's identity is to assume another, provided that the second be as distinctive as the first. We will leave for a moment the question of my officiousness in the matter, and we'll suppose, for the sake of argument, that I was authorized by you to do what in fact I have done. All last week the papers were literally full of your trial, but on Saturday there was a second sensation as well, and this morning it is hard to say which is first and which second; they both occupy so many columns. You may not know it, but the Cape liner due on Saturday was lost with scores of lives, off Finisterre, on Friday morning last."

Rachel failed to see the connection, and yet she felt vaguely that there was one, if she could but recall it; meanwhile she said nothing, but listened with as much attention as a mental search would permit.

"I heard of it first," continued Steel, "late on Friday afternoon, as I came away from the Old Bailey. Now, it was on Friday afternoon, if you recollect, that you gave evidence yourself in your own defence. When you left the witness-box, Mrs. Minchin, and even before you left it, I knew that you were saved!"

Rachel remembered the Swiss maid's remark about the loss of her clothes and the number of persons who had fared so much worse and lost their lives. But Steel's last words dismissed every thought but that of their own import. And in an instant she was trembling upright in the easy-chair.

"You believed me!" she whispered. "You believed me at the time!"

And for nothing had he earned such gratitude yet; her moist eyes saw the old-fashioned courtesy of his bow in answer, but not the subtlety of the smile that bore it company in the depths of the dark eyes: it was a smile that did not extend to the short, tight mouth.

"What is more to the point, my dear lady," he went on in words, "the jury believed you, and I saw that they did. You made a tremendous impression upon them. The lawyer against you was too humane to try very hard to remove it, and the judge too just—though your own man did his best. But I saw at once that it would never be removed. It was between you and the jury—human being to human beings—and no third legal party intervening. That was where you scored; you went straight as a die to those twelve simple hearts. And I saw what you had done—what the lawyers between them could not undo—and took immediate measures."

Rachel looked up with parted lips, only to shut them firmly without a word.

"And who was I to take measures on your behalf?" queried Steel, putting the question for her. "What right or excuse had I to mix myself up in your affairs? I will tell you, for this morning is not last night, and at least you have one good night's rest between you and the past. My dear Mrs. Minchin, I had absolutely no right at all; but I had the excuse which every man has who sees a woman left to stand alone against the world, and who thrusts himself, no matter how officiously, into the breach beside her. And then for a week I had seen you all day and every day, upon your trial!"

At last there something with a ring of definite insincerity, something that Rachel could take up; and she gazed upon her self-appointed champion with candid eyes.

"Do you mean to say that you never saw me before—my trouble, Mr. Steel?"

"Never in my life, my dear lady."

"Then you knew something about me or mine!"

"What one read in the newspapers—neither more nor less—upon my most solemn word—if that will satisfy you."

And it did; for if there had been palpable insincerity in his previous protestations, there was sincerity of a still more obvious order in Mr. Steel's downright assurances on these two points. He had never ever seen her before. He knew nothing whatever about her up to the period of notoriety; he had no special and no previous knowledge of his own. It might not be true, of course; but there was that in the deep-set eyes which convinced Rachel once and for all. There was a sudden light in them, a light as candid as that which happened to be shining in her own, but a not too kindly one, rather a glint of genuine resentment. It was his smooth protestations that Rachel distrusted and disliked. If she could ruffle him, she might get at the real man; and with her questions she appeared to have done so already.

"I am more than satisfied, in one way," replied Rachel, "and less in another. I rather wish you had known something about me; it would have made it more natural for you to come to my assistance. But never mind. What were these immediate measures?"

"I took these rooms; I had spoken of taking them earlier in the week."

"For me?"

"Yes, on the chance of your getting off."

"But you did not say they were for me!"

"No; and I was vague in what I had said until then. I had a daughter—a widow—whom I rather expected to arrive from abroad towards the end of the week. But I was quite vague."

"Because you thought I had no chance!"

"I had not heard your evidence. The very afternoon I did hear it, and had no longer any doubt about the issue in my own mind, I also heard of this wreck. The very thing! I waited till next morning for the list of the saved; luckily there were plenty of them; and I picked out the name of a married woman travelling alone, and therefore very possibly a widow, from the number. Then I went to the manager. The daughter whom I expected had been wrecked, but she was saved, and would arrive that night. As a matter of fact, the survivors were picked up by a passing North German Lloyd, and they did reach London on Saturday night. Meanwhile I had impressed it upon the manager to keep the matter as quiet as possible, for many excellent reasons, which I need not go into now."

"But the reason for so elaborate a pretence?"

And the keen, dark face was searched with a scrutiny worthy of itself. Steel set his mouth in another visible resolution to tell the truth.

"I thought you might not be sorry to cease being Mrs. Minchin—the Mrs. Minchin who had become so cruelly notorious through no fault of her own—if only for a day or two, or a single night. That was most easily to be effected by your arriving here minus possessions, and plus a very definite story of your own."

"You made very sure of me!" said Rachel, dryly.

"I trusted to my own powers of persuasion, and it was said you had no friends. I will confess," added Steel, "that I hoped the report was true."

"Did it follow that I could have no pride?"

"By no means; on the contrary, I knew that you were full of pride; it is, if I may venture to say so, one of your most salient characteristics. Nothing was more noticeable at your trial; nothing finer have I ever seen! But," added Steel, suppressing a burst of enthusiasm that gained by the suppression, "but, madam, I hoped and prayed that you would have the sense to put your pride in the second place for once."

"Well," said Rachel, "and so far I have done so, Heaven knows!"

"And that is something," rejoined Steel, impressively. "Even if it ends at this—even if you won't hear me out—it is something that you have had one night and one morning free from insult, discomfort, and annoyance."

Rachel felt half frightened and half indignant. Steel was standing up, looking very earnestly down upon her. And something that she had dimly divined in the very beginning—only to chide herself for the mere thought—that thing was in his face and in his voice. Rachel made a desperate attempt to change the subject, but, as will be seen, an unlucky one.

"So I am supposed to be your daughter!" she exclaimed nervously. "May I ask my new name?"

"If you like; but I am going to suggest to you a still newer name, Mrs. Minchin."

Rachel tried to laugh, though his quietly determined and serious face made it more than difficult.

"Do you mean that I am not to be your daughter any longer, Mr. Steel?"

"Not if I can help it. But it will depend upon yourself."

"And what do you want to make me now?"

"My wife!"

CHAPTER VIII

THE DOVE AND THE SERPENT

Rachel was bereft of speech; and yet a certain sense of relief underlay the natural embarrassment caused by a proposal so premature and so abrupt. Nor was the deeper emotion very difficult to analyze. Here at last was a logical explanation of the whole behavior of this man; it was the first that had occurred to her, and, after all, it was the only possible one.

"I want you to be my wife," repeated Mr. Steel, with enough of respect in his tone, yet none the less with the air of a man who is accustomed to obtain what he wants.

And Rachel, looking at the wiry, well-knit, upright figure, and at the fresh, elderly, but virile face, with its sombre eyes and its snowy hair, thought once again of the ancient saw which she had quoted to herself the night before, only to dismiss it finally from her mind. This man was no fool, nor was he old. He might be eccentric, but he was eminently sane; he might be elderly, in the arbitrary matter of mere years; but an old man he was not, and never would be with those eyes.

She tried to tell him it was absurd, but before the word could come she saw that it was the last one to apply; he was so confident, so quiet, so sure of himself, if not of Rachel. At last she told him she could not think of it, he had seen nothing of her, and could not possibly care for her, even supposing that she cared for him.

"By 'caring,'" said he, "do you mean being 'in love,' as they say, and all that?"

"Naturally," said Rachel, with great ease and irony, but with a new misgiving every moment.

"And have I said I was in love with you?" inquired Mr. Steel, with a smile as indulgent as his tone. "It might, perhaps, be no more than the truth; but have I had the insolence to tell you so?"

"It is a greater insult if you are not," returned Rachel, speaking hotly and quickly, but with lowered eyes.

"What! To offer to marry a person whom one does not—as yet—pretend to love?"

Rachel vouchsafed no reply.

"Whom one only—but tremendously—admires?"

Rachel felt bound to answer him, for at least there was no insult in his tone. She raised her candid eyes, a sweet brown blush upon her face.

"Yes," she said, "I think there is absolutely no excuse for a proposal of marriage, if it is not founded upon love and nothing else!"

"Or its pretence and nothing else," amended Steel, with a bow and a smile of some severity. "That is a hard saying," he went on, resuming his chair, and wheeling it even nearer to Rachel's than it had been before; "moreover," he added, "since I have already insulted you, let me tell you that it is an exceedingly commonplace saying, into the bargain. It depends, you must admit, upon the commonplace conception of marriage; and before we go any further I should like to give you my own conception, not of the institution, but of the particular marriage which I have in view."

So he had it in view! It was not an inspiration, but already quite a prospect! Rachel made an acid little note of this; but there was no acidity in her permission to him to proceed; her turn was coming last.

"The marriage that I propose to you," continued Steel, "is simply the most convenient form of friendship of which I can think. I want to be your friend; indeed, that much I mean to be, if necessary, in spite of you. I was interested in your case, so I came up to hear your trial. I was more interested in your trial, but most interested of all in yourself. There, indeed, the word is too weak; but I will not vex your spirit with a stronger. My attraction you know; my determination you know; even the low wiles to which your pride reduced me, even my dodging and dogging, have been quite openly admitted to you on the first reasonable opportunity. All this business of the shipwrecked daughter was of course a crude device enough; but I had very little time to think, and my first care was that you should not be recognized here or elsewhere in my society. That was essential, if there was the slightest chance of your even listening to my proposition, as indeed you are doing now. Last night I told you nothing, because that's always easier than telling only a little; moreover, you were so distraught that you would possibly have gone right away without benefiting even to the slight extent of the comfortable night's rest you so badly needed; but this morning I am prepared to put it to the touch. And let me begin by saying, that if circumstances would permit me to continue the paternal imposture, that would be quite enough for me; unluckily, I am known in my own country as an old bachelor; so that I cannot suddenly produce a widowed daughter, without considerable unpleasantness for us both. What I can do, however," and Steel bent further forward, with eyes that held Rachel's in their spell; "what I can do, and will, is to go back with a lady who shall be my wife in name, my daughter in effect. We should, I trust, be the best of friends; but I will give you my word, and not only my word but my bond, that we never need be anything more."

He had spoken rapidly; the pause that followed lasted longer than this lengthy speech. And through it all they sat with eyes still locked, until he spoke again.

"You believe, at least, in the bona fides of my offer?"

And Rachel, still looking in his eyes, murmured that she did.

"You will bear in mind how essentially it differs from the ordinary offer of the kind; also, that I have never for a moment pretended to be in love with you?"

"I will."

Steel had risen as if to go; the keen scrutiny was withdrawn, a distinct spell as distinctly broken; and yet he lingered, with a smile.

"That," said he, "was a poor compliment to pay twice over! But it is human to err, and in my anxiety not to do so on the side of sentiment I own myself in danger of flying to the other extreme. Well, you know which is the common extreme in such cases; and at all events we shall avoid the usual pitfall. I am going to give you a few minutes to think it over; then, if you care to go into it further, I shall be most happy; if not, the matter is at an end."

A few minutes! Rachel felt very angry, without knowing that she was most angry with herself for not feeling angrier still. She had heard quite enough; it were weakness to listen to another word; and yet—and yet—

"Don't go," said Rachel, with some petulance; "that is quite unnecessary. Anything more extraordinary—but I owe you too much already to be your critic. Still, I do think I am entitled to go a little further into the matter, as you said, without committing myself."

"To be sure you are."

But this time he remained standing; and for once he kept those mesmeric eyes to himself. Obviously, Rachel was to have a chance.

"You spoke of your own country," she began. "Do you live abroad?"

There was the least suspicion of eagerness in the question. Rachel herself was unaware of it; not so Mr. Steel, and he sighed.

"A mere figure," he said; "what I meant was my own country-side."

"And where is that?"

"In the north," he replied vaguely. "Did you look twice at my card? Well, here is another, if you will do me that honor now. The initials J. B. stand for no very interesting names—John Buchanan. A certain interest in the Buchanan, perhaps; it comes out in the flesh, I fancy, though not on the tongue. As for the address, Normanthorpe House is the rather historic old seat of the family of that name; but they have so many vastly superior and more modern places, and the last fifty years have so ruined the surroundings, that I was able to induce the Duke to take a price for it a year or two ago. He had hardly slept a night there in his life, and I got it lock-stock-and-barrel for a song. The Northborough which, you will observe, it is 'near'—a good four miles, as a matter of fact—is the well-known centre of the Delverton iron-trade. But you may very well have spent a year in this country without having heard of it; they would be shocked at Northborough, but nowhere else."

Rachel had dropped the card into her lap; she was looking straight at Mr. John Buchanan Steel himself.

"You are very rich," she said gravely.

"I am nothing of the kind," he protested. "The Duke is rich, if you like, but I had to scrape together to pay him what would replenish his racing-stud, or stand him in a new yacht."

But Rachel was not deceived.

"I might have known you were very rich," she murmured, as much to herself as to him; and there was a strange finality in her tone, as though all was over between them; a still more strange regret, involuntary, unconscious, and yet distinct.

"Granting your hypothesis, for the sake of argument," he went on, with his simplest smile; "is it as difficult as ever for the poor rich man to get to heaven?"

Rachel spent some moments in serious thought. He was wonderfully honest with her; of his central motive alone was she uncertain, unconvinced. In all else she felt instinctively that he was telling her the truth, telling her even more than he need. His generous candor was a challenge to her own.

"It may be very small of me," she said at length, "but—somehow—if you had been comparatively poor—I should have been less—ashamed!"

And candor begot candor, as it generally will.

"Upon my word," he cried, "you make me sigh for the suburbs and six hundred a year! But you shall know the worst. I meant you to know it when I came in; then I changed my mind; but in for a penny, in for the lot!"

He caught up the magazine which he had brought in with the sheaf of newspapers, and he handed it to Rachel, open at an article quite excellently illustrated for an English magazine.

"There," he cried, "there's a long screed about the wretched place, before it came into my hands. But it's no use pretending it isn't quite the place it was. I took over the whole thing—every stick outside and in—and I've put in new drainage and the electric light."

His tone of regret was intentionally ludicrous. Had Rachel been listening, she would once more have suspected a pose. But already she was deep in the article in the two-year-old magazine, or rather in its not inartistic illustrations.

"The House from the Tennis Lawn," "In the Kitchen Garden," "The Drawing-room Door," "A Drawing-room Chimney-piece," "A Corner of the Chinese Room," "A Portion of the Grand Staircase"—of such were the titles underneath the process pictures. And (in all but their production) each of these was more beautiful than the last.

"That," observed Steel, "happens to be the very article from which I first got wind of the place, when I was looking about for one. And now," he added, "I suppose I have cut my own throat! Like the devil, I have taken you up to a high place—"

It was no word from Rachel that cut him short, but his own taste, with which she at least had very little fault to find. And Rachel was critical enough; but her experience was still unripe, and she liked his view of his possessions, without perceiving how it disarmed her own.

Presently she looked up.

"Now I see how much I should have to gain. But what would you gain?"

The question was no sooner asked than Rachel foresaw the pretty speech which was its obvious answer. Mr. Steel, however, refrained from making it.

"I am an oldish man," he said, "and—yes, there is no use in denying that I am comfortably off. I want a wife; or rather, my neighbors seem bent upon finding me one; and, if the worst has to come to the worst, I prefer to choose for myself. Matrimony, however, is about the very last state of life that I desire, and I take it to be the same with you. Therefore—to put the cart before the horse—you would suit me ideally. One's own life would be unaltered, but the Delverton mothers would cease from troubling, and at the head of my establishment there would be a lady of whom I should be most justly proud. And even in my own life I should, I hope, be the more than occasional gainer by her society; may I also add, by her sympathy, by her advice? Mrs. Minchin," cried Steel, with sudden feeling, "the conditions shall be very rigid; my lawyer shall see to that; nor shall I allow myself a loophole for any weakness or nonsense whatsoever in the future. Old fellows like myself have made fools of themselves before to-day, but you shall be safeguarded from the beginning. Let there be no talk or thought of love between us from first to last! But as for admiration, I don't mind telling you that I admire you as I never admired any woman in the world before; and I hope, in spite of that, we shall be friends."

Still the indicative mood, still not for a moment the conditional! Rachel did not fail to make another note; but now there was nothing bitter even in her thoughts. She believed in this man, and in his promises; moreover, she began to focus the one thing about him in which she disbelieved. It was his feeling towards her—nothing more and nothing else. There he was insincere; but it was a pardonable insincerity, after all.

Of his admiration she was convinced; it had been open and honest all along; but there was something deeper than admiration. He could say what he liked. The woman knew. And what could it be but love?

The woman knew; and though the tragedy of her life was so close behind her; nay, though mystery and suspicion encompassed her still, as they might until her death, the woman thrilled.

It was a thrill of excitement chiefly, but excitement was not the only element. There was the personal factor, too; there was the fascination which this man had for her, which he could exert at will, and which he was undoubtedly exerting now.

To escape from his eyes, to think but once more for herself, and by herself, Rachel rose at last, and looked from the window which lit this recess.

It was the usual November day in London; no sun; a mist, but not a fog; cabmen in capes, horses sliding on the muddy street, well-dressed women picking their way home from church—shabby women hurrying in shawls—hurrying as Rachel herself had done the night before—as she might again to-night. And whither? And whither, in all the world?

Rachel turned from the window with a shudder; she caught up the first newspaper of the sheaf upon the writing-table. Steel had moved into the body of the room; she could not even see him through the alcove. So much the better; she would discover for herself what they said.

Leading articles are easily found, and in a Sunday paper they are seldom long. Rachel was soon through the first, her blood boiling; the second she could not finish for her tears; the third dried her eyes with the fires of fierce resentment. It was not so much what they said; it was what they were obviously afraid to say. It was their circumlocution, their innuendo, their mild surprise, their perfunctory congratulations, their assumption of chivalry and their lack of its essence, that wounded and stung the subject of these effusions. As she raised her flushed face from the last of them, Mr. Steel stood before her once more, the incarnation of all grave sympathy and consideration.

"You must not think," said he, "that my proposal admits of no alternative but the miserable one of making your own way in a suspicious and uncharitable world. On the contrary, if I am not to be your nominal and legal husband, I still intend to be your actual friend. On the first point you are to be consulted, but on the second not even you shall stand in my way. Nor in that event would I attempt to rob you of the independence which you value so highly; on the other hand, I would point the way to an independence worth having. I am glad you have seen those papers, though to-morrow they may be worse. Well, you may be shocked, but, if you won't have me, the worse the better, say I! Your case was most iniquitously commented upon before ever it came for trial; there is sure to be a fresh crop of iniquities now; but I shall be much mistaken if you cannot mulct the more flagrant offenders in heavy damages for libel."

Rachel shivered at the thought. She was done with her case for ever and for ever. People could think her guilty if they liked, but that the case should breed other cases, and thus drag on and on, and, above all, that she should make money out of all that past horror, what an unbearable idea!

On second thoughts, Mr. Steel agreed.

"Then you must let me send you back to Australia." No, no, no; she could never show her face there again, or anywhere else where she was known. She must begin life afresh, that was evident.

"It was evident to me," said Steel, quietly, "though not more so than the injustice of it, from the very beginning. Hence the plans and proposals that I have put before you."

Rachel regarded him wildly; the Sunday papers had driven her to desperation, as, perhaps, it was intended that they should.

"Are you sure," she cried, "that they would not know me—up north?"

"Not from Eve," he answered airily. "I should see to that; and, besides, we should first travel, say until the summer."

"If only I could begin my life again!" said Rachel to herself, but aloud, in a way that made no secret of her last, most desperate inclination.

"That is exactly what I wish you to do," Steel rejoined quietly, even gently, his hand lying lightly but kindly upon her quivering shoulder. How strong his touch, how firm, how reassuring! It was her first contact with his hand.

"I wish it so much," he went on, "that I would have your past life utterly buried, even between ourselves; nay, if it were possible, even in your own mind also! I, for my part, would undertake never to ask you one solitary question about that life—on one small and only fair condition. Supposing we make a compact now?"

"Anything to bury my own past," owned Rachel; "yes, I would do anything—anything!"

"Then you must help me to bury mine, too," he said. "I was never married, but a past I have."

"I would do my best," said Rachel, "if I married you."

"You will do your best," added Steel, correcting her; "and there is my compact cut and dried. I ask you nothing; you ask me nothing; and there is to be no question of love between us, first or last. But we help each other to forget—from this day forth!"

Rachel could not speak; his eyes were upon her, black, inscrutable, arrestive of her very faculties, to say nothing of her will. She could only answer him when he had turned away and was moving towards the door.

"Where are you going?" she cried.

"To send to my solicitor," replied Steel, "as I warned him that I might. It has all to be drawn up; and there is the question of a settlement; and other questions, perhaps, which you may like to put to him yourself without delay."

CHAPTER IX

A CHANGE OF SCENE

The Reverend Hugh Woodgate, Vicar of Marley-in-Delverton—a benefice for generations in the gift of the Dukes of Normanthorpe, but latterly in that of one John Buchanan Steel—was writing his sermon on a Friday afternoon just six months after the foregoing events. The month was therefore May, and, at either end of the long, low room in which Mr. Woodgate sat at work, the windows were filled with a flutter of summer curtains against a brilliant background of waving greenery. But a fire burned in one of the two fireplaces in the old-fashioned funnel of a room, for a treacherous east wind skimmed the sunlit earth outside, and whistled and sang through one window as the birds did through the other.

Mr. Woodgate was a tall, broad-shouldered, mild-eyed man, with a blot of whisker under each ear, and the cleanest of clerical collars encompassing his throat. It was a kindly face that pored over the unpretentious periods, as they grew by degrees upon the blue-lined paper, in the peculiar but not uncommon hand which is the hall-mark of a certain sort of education upon a certain order of mind. The present specimen was perhaps more methodical than most; therein it was characteristic of the man. From May to September, Mr. Woodgate never failed to finish his sermon on the Friday, that on the Saturday he might be free to play cricket with his men and lads. He was a poor preacher and no cricketer at all; but in both branches he did his best, with the simple zeal and the unconscious sincerity which redeemed not a few of his deficiencies.

So intent was the vicar upon his task, so engrossed in the expression of that which had already been expressed many a million times, that he did not hear wheels in his drive, on the side where the wind sang loudest; he heard nothing until the door opened, and a girl in her twenties, trim, slim, and brown with health, came hurriedly in.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, dear, but who do you think is here?"

Hugh Woodgate turned round in his chair, and his honest ox-eyes filled with open admiration of the wife who was so many years younger than himself, and who had seen in him Heaven knew what! He never could look at her without that look first; and only now, after some years of marriage, was he beginning sometimes to do so without this thought next. But he had not the gift of expression, even in the perpetual matter of his devotion; and perhaps its perpetuity owed something to that very want; at least there was none of the verbal evaporation which comes of too much lovers' talk.

"Who is it?" he asked.

"Mrs. Venables!"

Woodgate groaned. Was he obliged to appear? His jaw fell, and his wife's eyes sparkled.

"Dear, I wouldn't even have let you know she was here—you shouldn't have been interrupted for a single instant—if Mrs. Venables wasn't clamoring to see you. And really I begin to clamor too; for she is full of some mysterious news, which she won't tell me till you are there to hear it also. Be an angel, for five minutes!"

Woodgate wiped his pen in his deliberate way.

"Probably one of the girls is engaged," said he; "if so I hope it's Sybil."

"No, Sybil is here too; she doesn't look a bit engaged, but rather bored, as though she had heard the story several times already, whatever it may be. They have certainly paid several calls. Now you look quite nice, so in you come."

Mrs. Venables, a stout but comely lady, with a bright brown eye, and a face full of character and ability, opened fire upon the vicar as soon as they had shaken hands, while her daughter looked wistfully at the nearest books.

"He is married!" cried Mrs. Venables, beginning in the middle like a modern novelist.

"Indeed?" returned the matter-of-fact clergyman, with equal directness—"and who is he?"

"Your neighbor and your patron—Mr. Steel!"

"Married?" repeated Mrs. Woodgate, with tremendous emphasis. "Mr. Steel?"

"This is news!" declared her husband, as though he had expected none worthy of the name. And they both demanded further particulars, at which Mrs. Venables shook her expensive bonnet with great relish.

"Do you know Mr. Steel so well—so much better than we do—and can you ask for particulars about anything he ever does? His marriage," continued Mrs. Venables, "like everything else about him, is 'wrop in mystery,' as one of those vulgar creatures says in Dickens, but I really forget which. It was never announced in the Times; for that I can vouch myself. Was ever anything more like him, or less like anybody else? To disappear for six months, and then turn up with a wife!"

"But has he turned up?" cried the vicar's young wife, forgetting for a moment a certain preoccupation caused by the arrival of the tea-tray, and by a rapid resignation to the thickness of the bread and butter and the distressing absence of such hot things as would have been in readiness if Mrs. Venables had been expected for a single moment. It showed the youth of Morna Woodgate that she should harbor a wish to compete with the wealthiest woman in the neighborhood, even in the matter of afternoon tea, and her breeding that no such thought was legible in her clear-cut open-air face.

"I have heard nothing about it," said the vicar, in a tone indicative of much honest doubt in the matter.

"Nor is it the case, to my knowledge," rejoined Mrs. Venables; "but from all we hear it may become the case any moment. They were married in Italy last autumn—so he says—and are on their way home at this minute."

"If he says so," observed the vicar, with mild humor, "it is probably true. He ought to know."

"And who was she?" his young wife asked with immense interest, the cups having gone round, and the bread and butter been accepted in spite of its proportions.

"My dear Mrs. Woodgate," said Mrs. Venables, cordially, "you may well ask! Who was she, indeed! It was the first question I asked my own informant, who, by the way, was your friend, Mr. Langholm; but he knew no more than the man in the moon."

"And who told Mr. Langholm, of all people?" pursued Morna Woodgate. "It is not often that we get news of the real world from him!"

"Birds of a feather," remarked her caller: "it was Mr. Steel himself who wrote to your other eccentric friend, and told him neither more nor less than I have told you. He was married in Italy last autumn; not even the town—not even the month—let alone the lady's name—if, indeed—"

And Mrs. Venables concluded with a sufficiently eloquent hiatus.

"I imagine she is a lady," said the vicar to his tea.

"You are so charitable, dear Mr. Woodgate!"

"I hope I am," he said simply. "In this case I see no reason to be anything else."

"What—when you know really nothing about Mr. Steel himself?"

And the bright brown eyes of Mrs. Venables grew smaller and harder as they pinned Hugh Woodgate to his chair.

"I beg your pardon," said that downright person; "I know a great deal about Mr. Steel. He has done an immense amount for the parish; there are our new schoolrooms to speak for themselves. There are very few who would do the half of what Mr. Steel has done for us during the short time he has been at Normanthorpe."

"That may be," said the lady, with the ample smile of conscious condescension; "for he has certainly not omitted to let his light shine before men. But that is not telling us who or what he was before he came here, or how he made his money."

Then Hugh Woodgate gave the half boyish, half bashful laugh with which he was wont to preface his most candid sayings.

"And I don't think it's any business of ours," he said.

Morna went a trifle browner than she naturally was; her husband said so little that what he did say was often almost painfully to the point; and now Mrs. Venables had turned from him to her, with a smile which the young wife disliked, for it called attention to the vicar's discourtesy while it appealed to herself for prettier manners and better sense. It was a moment requiring some little tact, but Mrs. Woodgate was just equal to it.

"Hugh, how rude of you!" she exclaimed, with only the suspicion of a smile. "You forget that it's your duty to be friendly with everybody; there's no such obligation on anybody else."

"I should be friendly with Mr. Steel," said Hugh, "duty or no duty, after what he has done for the parish."

And his pleasant honest face and smile did away with the necessity for a set apology.

"I must say," added his wife to her visitor, "that it's the same with me, you know."

There was a pause.

"Then you intend to call upon her?" said Mrs. Venables, coming with directness to an obviously premeditated point.

"I do—I must—it is so different with us," said the vicar's young wife, with her pretty brown blush.

"Certainly," added the vicar himself, with dogmatic emphasis.

Mrs. Venables did not look at him, but she looked the harder at Morna instead.

"Well," said she, "I suppose you are right. In your position—yes—your position is quite different!" And the sudden, half accidental turn of her sentence put Mrs. Venables on good terms with herself once more; and so she rose all smiles and velvet. "No, not even half a cup; but it was really quite delicious; and I hope you'll come and see me soon, and tell me all about her. At his age!" she whispered as she went. "At sixty-five—if he's a day!"

A stranger would have imagined that this lady had quite decided not to call upon the newcomer herself; even Mrs. Woodgate was uncertain of her neighbor's intention as the latter's wheels ground the Vicarage drive once more, and she and her husband were left alone.

"It will depend upon the county," said she; "and Mrs. Venables is not the county pure and simple, she's half Northborough still, and she'll take her cue from the Invernesses and the Uniackes. But I do believe she's been round the whole country-side, getting people to say they won't call; as if it mattered to a man like Mr. Steel, or any woman he is likely to have chosen. Still, it is mysterious, isn't it? But what business of ours, as you say? Only, dear, you needn't have said it quite so pointedly. Of course I'll call as soon as I can in decency; she may let me be of use to her. Oh, bother Mrs. Venables! If she doesn't call, no doubt many others won't; you must remember that he has never entertained as yet. Oh, what a dance they could give! And did you hear what she said about his age? He is sixty-five, now!"

The vicar laughed. It was his habit to let his young wife rattle on when they were alone, and even lay down the law for him to her heart's content; but, though fifteen years her senior, and never a vivacious man himself, there was much in their life that he saw in the same light as she did, though never quite so soon.

"Sixty-five!" he suddenly repeated, with a fresh chuckle; "and last year, when Sybil was thought to be in the running—poor Sybil, how well she took it!—last year her mother told me she knew for a fact he was not a day more than five-and-forty! Poor Steel, too! He has done for them both in that quarter, I am afraid. And now," added Hugh, in his matter-of-fact way, as though they had been discussing theology all this time, "I must go back to my sermon if I am to get it done to-night."

CHAPTER X

A SLIGHT DISCREPANCY

Mrs. Woodgate paid the promised call a few days later, walking briskly by herself along the woodland path that made it no distance from Marley Vicarage to Normanthorpe House, and cutting a very attractive figure among the shimmering lights and shadows of the trees. She was rather tall, and very straight, with the pale brown skin and the dark brown eye, which, more especially when associated with hair as light as Morna Woodgate's, go to make up one of the most charming and distinctive types of English womanhood. Morna, moreover, took a healthy interest in her own appearance, and had not only the good taste to dress well, but the good sense not to dress too well. Her new coat and skirt had just come home, and, fawn-colored like herself, they fitted and suited her to equal perfection. Morna thought that she might even go to church in the coat and skirt, now and again during the summer, and she had a brown straw hat with fine feathers of the lighter shade which she made peculiarly her own; but this she had discarded as too grand for an informal call, for Hugh had been summoned to a sick-bed at the last moment, and might be detained too late to follow. But the Steels had been back two days, and Morna could not wait another hour.

She was certainly consumed with curiosity; but that was not the only feeling which Mrs. Woodgate entertained towards the lady who was to be a nearer neighbor of her own sex and class than any she could count as yet. On the class question Morna had no misgivings; nevertheless, she was prepared for a surprise. Both she and her husband had seen a good deal of Mr. Steel. Morna had perhaps seen the best of him, since she was at once young and charming, and not even an unwilling and personally innocent candidate for his hand, like honest Sybil Venables. Yet Morna herself was not more attracted than repelled by the inscrutable personality of this rich man dropped from the clouds, who had never a word to say about his former life, never an anecdote to tell, never an adventure to record, and of whom even Mrs. Venables had not the courage to ask questions. What sort of woman would such a man marry, and what sort of woman would marry such a man? Morna asked herself the one question after the other, almost as often as she set her right foot in front of her left; but she was not merely inquisitive in the matter, she had a secret and instinctive compassion for the woman who had done this thing.

"She will not have a soul to call her own, poor thing!" thought Morna, as indignantly as though the imaginary evil was one of the worst that could befall; for the vicar's wife had her little weaknesses, not by any means regarded as such by herself; and this was one of the last things that could have been said about her, or that she would have cared to hear.

The woodland path led at last into the long avenue, and there was Normanthorpe House at the end of the vista; an Italian palace transplanted into the north of England, radiantly white between the green trees and blue sky, with golden cupola burning in the sun; perhaps the best specimen extant to mark a passing fashion in Georgian architecture, but as ill-suited to the Delverton district as an umbrella-tent to the North Pole. A cool grotto on a really hot day, the house was an ice-pit on any other; or so Mrs. Woodgate fancied, fresh from the cosey Vicarage, and warm from her rapid walk, as she stepped into another temperature, across polished marble that struck a chill through the soles of her natty brown shoes, and so into the lofty drawing-room with pilasters and elaborate architraves to the doors. What a place for a sane man to build in bleak old Delverton, even before there was any Northborough to blacken and foul the north-east wind on its way from the sea! What a place for a sane man to buy; and yet, in its cool white smoothness, its glaring individuality, its alien air—how like the buyer!

Though it was May, and warm enough for the month and place, Morna got up when the footman had left her, and thrust one brown shoe after the other as near as she could to the wood fire that glimmered underneath the great, ornate, marble mantelpiece. Then she sat down again, and wondered what to say; for Morna was at once above and below the conversational average of her kind. Soon she was framing a self-conscious apology for premature intrusion—Mrs. Steel was so long in coming. But at last there was a rustle in the conservatory, and a slender figure in a big hat stood for an instant on the threshold.

That was Morna's first impression of the new mistress of Normanthorpe, and it was never erased from her mind; a slender silhouette in an enormous hat, the light all behind her, the pilastered doorway for a frame, a gay background of hothouse flowers, and in the figure itself a nervous hesitancy which struck an immediate chord of sympathy in Morna. She also was shy; the touch of imperfect nature was mutually discernible and discerned; and the two were kin from the meeting of their hands.

Morna began her apology, nevertheless; but Rachel cut it very short. "My dear Mrs. Woodgate, I think it is so kind of you!" she exclaimed, her low voice full of the frankest gratitude; and Morna was surprised at the time; it was as though she were the rich man's wife, and Mrs. Steel the vicar's.

They sat a little, talking of the time of year; and it was some minutes before Morna really saw her new neighbor's face, what with her great hat and the position of the chair which Mrs. Steel selected. And for these few minutes, after that first frank speech, the greater constraint was on the part of the hostess; then all at once she seemed to throw it off, rising impulsively, as though the great high room, with the Italian tiles and the garish gilt furniture, struck the same chill to her as to Morna before her.

"Come round the garden," said Rachel, quickly. "I am delighted with the garden, and I think it's really warmer than the house."

Delightful it certainly was, or rather they, for the Normanthorpe gardens were never spoken of in the singular number by those familiar with their fame; they had been reconstructed and enlarged by a dead duke with a fad for botany, and kept up by successors who could not endure the cold, uncomfortable house. It was said to have been a similar taste in Mr. Steel which had first attracted him to the place; but as he never confirmed or contradicted anything that was said of him, and would only smile when a rumor reached his ears, there was no real foundation for the report.

The ducal botanist had left behind him the rarest collection of plants and trees, and a tradition in scientific gardening which had not been allowed to die; it was neglected Normanthorpe that had loaded the tables and replenished the greenhouses of seats more favored by the family; and all this was the more wonderful as a triumph of art over some natural disadvantages in the way of soil and climate. The Normanthorpe roses, famous throughout the north of England, were as yet barely budding in the kindless wind; the blaze of early bulbs was over; but there were the curious alien trees, and the ornamental waters haunted by outlandish wildfowl, bred there on the same principle of acclimatization.

"I expect you know the way quite well," said Rachel, as they followed a winding path over a bank of rhododendrons near the lake; "to me every stroll is still a voyage of exploration, and I shall be rather sorry when I begin to know exactly what I am going to see next. Now, I have never been this way before, and have no idea what is coming, so you must tell me, if you know. What a funny scent! I seem to know it, too. Why, what have they got here?"

On the further side of the bank of rhododendrons the path had descended into a sheltered hollow, screened altogether from the colder winds, and, even in this temperate month of May, a very trap for the afternoon sun. And in this hollow was a clump of attenuated trees, with drooping leaves of a lacklustre hue, and a white bark peeling from the trunk; a pungent aroma, more medicinal than sylvan, hung rather heavily over the sequestered spot.

Rachel stood a moment with wide nostrils and round eyes; the look hardly lasted longer, and she said no more, but she was aware that Morna had made some answer to her question.

"What did you say?" inquired Rachel, turning politely to her visitor.

"I said they were blue gums from Australia."

Rachel made no immediate comment; secretive she might have to be, but to a deliberate pretence she would not stoop. So she did not even say, "Indeed!" but merely, after a pause, "You are something of a botanist yourself, then, Mrs. Woodgate?" For they had been talking of the gardens and of their history as they walked.

"I?" laughed Morna. "I only wish I was; but I happen to remember Mr. Steel telling me that one day when we were here last summer."

Rachel opened her eyes again, and her lips with them; but instead of speaking she went to the nearest gum-tree and picked a spray of the lacklustre leaves. "I like the smell of them," she said, as they went on; and the little incident left no impression upon Morna's mind.

Yet presently she perceived that Mrs. Steel had some color after all—at the moment Rachel happened to be smelling her gum-leaves—and that she was altogether prettier than Morna had fancied hitherto. The fact was that it was her first good look at Rachel, who had kept her back to the light indoors, and had literally led the way along the narrow paths, while her large hat had supplied a perpetual shadow of its own. It was a pathetic habit, which had become second nature with Rachel during the last six months; but now, for once, it was forgotten, and her face raised unguardedly to the sun, which painted it in its true and sweet colors, to Morna's surprise and real delight. The vicar's wife was one of those healthy-hearted young women who are the first to admire their own sex; she had very many friends among women, for whom marriage had not damped an enthusiasm which she hid from no one but themselves; and she was to be sufficiently enthusiastic about the thin but perfect oval of Rachel's face, the soft, sweet hazel of her eyes, the impetuous upper lip and the brave lower one, as she saw them now for an instant in the afternoon sun.

Moreover, she was already interested in Rachel on her own account, and not only as the wife of the mysterious Mr. Steel. There was an undoubted air of mystery about her also; but that might only be derived from him, and with all her reserve she could not conceal a sweet and sympathetic self from one as like her in that essential as they were different in all others. Not that the reserve was all on one side. Morna Woodgate had her own secrets too. One of them, however, was extracted during their stroll.

"May I make a personal remark?" asked Rachel, who had been admiring the pale brown face of Morna in her turn, as they came slowly back to the house across the lawns.

"You frighten me," said Morna, laughing. "But let me hear the worst."

"It's the ribbon on your hat," went on Rachel. "What pretty colors! Are they your husband's school or college?"

"No," said Morna, blushing as she laughed again. "No, they're my own college colors."

Rachel stood still on the grass.

"Have you really been at college?" said she; but her tone was so obviously one of envy that Morna, who was delightfully sensitive about her learning, did not even think of the short answer which she sometimes returned to the astonished queries of the intellectually vulgar, but admitted the impeachment with another laugh.

"Now, don't say you wouldn't have thought it of me," she added, "and don't say you would!"

"I am far too jealous to say anything at all," Rachel answered with a flattering stare. "And do you mean to tell me that you took a degree?"

"Of sorts," admitted Morna, whose spoken English was by no means undefiled. But it turned out to have been a mathematical degree; and when, under sympathetic pressure, Morna vouchsafed particulars, even Rachel knew enough to appreciate the honors which the vicar's wife had won. What was more difficult to understand was how so young a woman of such distinguished attainments could be content to hide her light under the bushel of a country vicarage; and Rachel could not resist some expression of her wonderment on that point.

"Did you do nothing with it all," she asked, "before you married?"

"No," said Morna; "you see, I got engaged in the middle of it, and the week after the lists came out we were married."

"What a career to have given up!"

"I would give it up again," said Morna, with a warmer blush; and Rachel was left with a deeper envy.

"I am afraid we shall have nothing in common," sighed Mrs. Steel, as they neared the house. "I have no education worthy the name."

Morna waxed all but indignant at the implication; she had a morbid horror of being considered a "blue-stocking," which she revealed with much girlish naïveté and unconscious simplicity of sentiment and praise. She was not so narrow as all that; she had had enough of learning; she had forgotten all that she had learnt; any dolt could be crammed to pass examinations. On the contrary, she was quite sure they would have heaps in common; for example, she was longing for some one to bicycle with; her husband seldom had the time, and he did not care for her to go quite alone in the country roads.

"But I don't bicycle," said Mrs. Steel, shaking her head rather sadly.

"Ah, I forgot! People who ride and drive never do." And it was Morna's turn to sigh.

"No, I should like it; but I have never tried."

"I'll teach you!" cried Morna at once. "What fun it will be!"

"I should enjoy it, I know. But—"

The sentence was abandoned—as was often the case in the subsequent intercourse between Rachel Steel and Morna Woodgate. From the beginning, Rachel was apt to be more off her guard with Morna than with any one whom she had met during the last six months; and, from the beginning, she was continually remembering and stopping herself in a manner that would have irritated Morna in anybody else. But then—yet again, from the beginning—these two were natural and immediate friends.

"You must learn," urged Morna, when she had waited some time for the sentence which had but begun. "There are people who scorn it—or pretend to—but I am sure you are not one. It may not be the finest form of exercise, but wait till you fly down these hills with your feet on the rests! And then you are so independent; no horses to consider, no coachman to consult; only your own bones and your own self! The independence alone—"

"May be the very thing for you, Mrs. Woodgate, but it wouldn't do for my wife!"

Mr. Steel had stolen a silent march upon them, on the soft, smooth grass; and now he was taking off his straw hat to Morna, and smiling with all urbanity as he held out his hand. But Morna had seen how his wife started at the sound of his voice, and her greeting was a little cool.

"I meant the bicycling," he was quick enough to add; "not the independence, of course!"

But there was something sinister in his smile, something quite sinister and yet not unkindly, that vexed and puzzled Morna during the remainder of her visit, which she cut somewhat short on perceiving that Mr. Steel had apparently no intention of leaving them to their own devices after tea. Morna, however, would have been still more puzzled, and her spirit not less vexed, had she heard the first words between the newly married couple after she had gone.

"What's that you have got?" asked Steel, as they turned back up the drive, after seeing Morna to her woodland path. Rachel was still carrying her spray of gum-leaves; he must have noticed it before, but this was the first sign that he had done so. She said at once what it was, and why she had pulled it from the tree.

"It took me back to Victoria; and, you know, I was born there."

Steel looked narrowly at his wife, a hard gleam in his inscrutable eyes, and yet a lurking sympathy too, nor was there anything but the latter in the tone and tenor of his reply.

"I don't forget," he said, "and I think I can understand; but neither must you forget that I offered to take you back there. So that's a sprig of gum-tree, is it?"

Rachel gave him a sudden glance, which for once he missed, being absorbed in a curious examination of the leaves.

"Did you never see one before?" she asked.

"A gum-tree?" said Steel, without looking up, as he sniffed and scrutinized. "Never in all my life—to my knowledge!"

CHAPTER XI

ANOTHER NEW FRIEND

The country folk did call upon the Steels, as indeed, they could scarcely fail to do, having called on him already as a bachelor the year before. Nor were the Uniackes and the Invernesses the bell-wethers of the flock. Those august families had returned to London for the season; but the taboo half-suggested by Mrs. Venables had begun and ended in her own mind. Indeed, that potent and diplomatic dame, who was the undoubted leader of society within a four-mile radius of Northborough town hall, was the first to recognize the mistake that she had made, and to behave as though she had never made it. Quite early in June, the Steels were bidden to a dinner-party in their honor at Upthorpe Hall.

"Mrs. Venables!" cried Rachel, in dismay. "Is that the gushing woman with the quiet daughters who called last Thursday?"

"That is the lady," said Steel, a gleam of humor in his grim eyes. He never expressed an opinion to his wife about any one of their neighbors, but when she let fall an impression of her own, he would look at her in this way, as though it was the very one that he had formed for himself a year ago.

"But need we go?" asked Rachel, with open apprehension.

"I think so," he said. "Why not?"

"A dinner-party, of all things! There is no cover at the dinner-table; you can't even wear a hat; you must sit there in a glare for hours and hours!" And Rachel shuddered. "Oh, don't let us go!" she urged; but her tone was neither pathetic nor despairing; though free from the faintest accent of affection, it was, nevertheless, the tone of a woman who has not always been denied.

"I am afraid we must go," he said firmly, but not unkindly. "You see, it is in our honor—as I happen to know; for Venables gave me a hint when I met him in the town the other day. He will take you in himself."

"And what is he like?"

"Fond of his dinner; he won't worry you," said Steel, reassuringly. "Nor need you really bother your head about all that any more. Nobody has recognized you yet; nobody is in the least likely to do so down here. Don't you see how delightfully provincial they are? There's a local lawyer, a pillar of all the virtues, who has misappropriated his own daughter-in-law's marriage portion and fled the country with the principal boy in their last pantomime; there are a lot of smart young fellows who are making a sporting thousand every other day out of iron warrants; the district's looking up after thirty years' bad times; and this is the sort of thing it's talking about. These are its heroes and its villains. All you hear from London is what the last man spent when he was up, and where he dined; and from all I can gather, the Tichborne trial made less impression down here than that of a Delverton parson who got into trouble about the same time."

"They must have heard of my trial," said Rachel, in a low voice. They were walking in the grounds after breakfast, but she looked round before speaking at all.

"They would glance at it," said Steel, with a shrug; "an occasional schoolboy might read it through; but even if you were guilty, and were here on view, you would command much less attention than the local malefactor in an infinitely smaller way. I am sorry I put it quite like that," added Steel, as Rachel winced, "but I feel convinced about it, and only wish I could convince you."

And he did so, more or less; but the fear of recognition had increased in Rachel, instead of abating, as time went on. It had increased especially since the rapid ripening of her acquaintance with Morna Woodgate into the intimacy which already subsisted between the two young wives. Rachel had told her husband that she would not have Morna know for anything; and he had appeared in his own dark way to sympathize with a solicitude which was more actual than necessary; but that was perhaps because he approved of Mrs. Woodgate on his own account. And so rare was that approval, as a positive and known quantity, yet so marked in this case, that he usually contrived to share Morna's society with his wife.

"You shall not monopolize Mrs. Woodgate," he would say with all urbanity as he joined them when least expected. "I was first in the field, you know!"

And in the field he would remain. There were no commands, no wishes to obey in the matter, no embargo upon the comings and goings between the two new friends. But Mr. Steel invariably appeared upon the scene as well. The good vicar attributed it to the elderly bridegroom's jealous infatuation for his beautiful young bride; but Morna knew better from the first.

"Are you going?" asked Rachel, eagerly, when she and Morna met again; indeed, she had gone expressly to the Vicarage to ask the question; and not until she had seen the Woodgates' invitation could Steel himself induce her to answer theirs.

The Woodgates were going. Morna was already in alternate fits of despair and of ideas about her dress.

"I wish I might dress you!" said Rachel, knowing her well enough already to say that. "I have wardrobes full of them, and yet my husband insists upon taking me up to London to get something fit to wear!"

"But not necessarily on your back!" cried Steel himself, appearing at that moment in his usual way, warm, breathless, but only playfully put out. "My dear Mrs. Woodgate, I must have a special wire between your house and ours. One thing, however, I always know where to find her! Did she tell you we go by the 12:55 from Northborough?"

It was something to wear upon her neck—a diamond necklet of superb stones, gradually swelling to one of the first water at the throat; and Rachel duly wore it at the dinner-party, with a rich gown of bridal white, whose dazzling purity had perhaps the effect of cancelling the bride's own pallor. But she was very pale. It was her first appearance at a gathering of the kind, not only there in Delverton, but anywhere at all since her second marriage. And the invitation had been of the correct, most ample length; it had had time to wind itself about Rachel's nerves.

Mr. Venables, who of course did take her in, by no means belied her husband's description of him; he was a rotund man with a high complexion, and his bulging eye was on the menu before his soft body had sunk into his chair. His conversation proved limited, but strictly to the point; he told Rachel what to eat, and once or twice what to avoid; lavished impersonal praise upon one dish, impartial criticisms upon another, and only spoke between the courses. It was a large dinner-party; twenty-two sat down. Rachel was at last driven to glancing at the other twenty.

To the man on her left she had not been introduced, but he had offered one or two civil observations while Mr. Venables was better engaged; and, after the second, Rachel had chanced to catch sight of the card upon which his name had been inscribed. He was, it seemed, a Mr. Langholm; and all at once Rachel leant back and looked at him. He was a loose-limbed, round-shouldered man, with a fine open countenance, and a great disorderly moustache; his hair might have been shorter, and his dress-coat shone where it caught the light. Rachel put the screw upon her courage.

"These cards," she said, with a glimpse of her own colonial self, "are very handy when one hasn't been introduced. Your name is not very common, is it?"

"Not very," he answered, "spelt like that."

"Yes it's spelt the same way as the Mr. Langholm who writes."

"It is."

"Then are you any relation?"

"I am the man himself," said Langholm, with quite a hearty laugh, accompanied by a flush of pleasurable embarrassment. He was not a particularly popular writer, and this did not happen to him every day.

"I hoped you were," said Rachel, as she helped herself to the first entrée.

"Then you haven't read my books," he chuckled, "and you never must."

"But I have," protested Rachel, quite flushed in her turn by the small excitement. "I read heaps of them in Tauchnitz when we were abroad. But I had no idea that I should ever meet you in the flesh!"

"Really?" he said. "Then that's funnier still; but I suppose Mr. Steel didn't want to frighten you. We saw quite a lot of each other last year; he wrote to me from Florence before you came over; and I should have paid my respects long ago, but I have been up in town, and only just come back."

The flush had died out of Rachel's face. Her husband told her nothing—nothing! In her indignation she was tempted to say so to the stranger; she had to think a moment what to say instead. A falsehood of any sort was always a peculiar difficulty to Rachel, a constitutional aversion, and it cost her an effort to remark at last that it was very stupid of her, she had quite forgotten, but now she remembered—of course! And with that she turned to her host, who was offering an observation across his empty plate.

"Strange thing, Mrs. Steel, but you can't get the meat in the country that you can in town. Those fillets, now—I wish you could taste 'em at my club; but we give our chef a thousand a year, and he drives up every day in his brougham."

The novels of Charles Langholm were chiefly remarkable for their intricate plots, and for the hope of better things that breathed through the cheap sensation of the best of them. But it was a hope that had been deferred a good many years. His manner was better than his matter; indeed, an incongruous polish was said by the literary to prevent Langholm from being a first favorite either with the great public or the little critics. As a maker of plots, however, he still had humble points; and Rachel assured him that she had burnt her candle all night in order to solve one of his ingenious mysteries.

"What!" he cried; "you call yourself a lady, and you don't look at the end before you reach it?"

"Not when it's a good book."

"Well, you have pitched on about the best of a bad lot; and it's a satisfaction to know you didn't cut the knot it took some months to tie."

Rachel was greatly interested. She had never before met a literary man; had no idea how the trick was done; and she asked many of those ingenuous questions which seldom really displease the average gentleman of this type. When not expatiating upon the heroine whom the exigencies of "serial rights" demanded in his books, Charles Langholm, the talker and the man, was an unmuzzled misogynist. But nobody would have suspected it from his answers to Rachel's questions, or from any portion of their animated conversation. Certainly the aquiline lady whom Langholm had taken in, and to whom he was only attentive by remorseful fits and penitential starts, had not that satisfaction; for her right-hand neighbor did not speak to her at all. There was thus one close and critical follower of a conversation which without warning took the one dramatic turn for which Rachel was forever on her guard; only this once, in an hour of unexpected entertainment, was she not.

"How do I get my plots?" said Langholm. "Sometimes out of my head, as they say in the nursery; occasionally from real life; more often a blend of the two combined. You don't often get a present from the newspaper that you can lift into a magazine more or less as it stands. Facts are stubborn things; they won't serialize. But now and then there's a case. There was one a little time ago. Oh, there was a great case not long since, if we had but the man to handle it, without spoiling it, in English fiction!"

"And what was that?"

"The Minchin case!"

And he looked straight at her, as one only looks at one's neighbor at table when one is saying or hearing something out of the common; he turned half round, and he looked in Rachel's face with the smile of an artist with a masterpiece in his eye. It was an inevitable moment, come at last when least expected; instinct, however, had prepared Rachel, just one moment before; and after all she could stare coldly on his enthusiasm, without a start or a tremor to betray the pose.

"Yes?" she said, her fine eyebrows raised a little. "And do you really think that would make a book?"

It was characteristic of Rachel that she did not for a moment—even that unlooked-for moment—pretend to be unfamiliar with the case.

"Don't you?" he asked.

"I haven't thought about it," said Rachel, looking pensively at the flowers. "But surely it was a very sordid case?"

"The case!" he cried. "Yes, sordid as you like; but I don't mean the case at all."

"Then what do you mean, Mr. Langholm?"

"Her after life," he whispered; "the psychology of that woman, and her subsequent adventures! She disappeared into thin air immediately after the trial. I suppose you knew that?"

"I did hear it."

Rachel moistened her lips with champagne.

"Well, I should take her from that moment," said Langholm. "I should start her story there."

"And should you make her guilty or not guilty?"

"Ah!" said Langholm, as though that would require consideration; unluckily, he paused to consider on the spot.

"Who are you talking about?" inquired Mr. Venables, who had caught Rachel's last words.

"Mrs. Minchin," she told him steadily.

"Guilty!" cried Mr. Venables, with great energy. "Guilty, and I'd have gone to see her hanged myself!"

And Mr. Venables beamed upon Rachel as though proud of the sentiment, while the diamonds rose and fell upon her white neck, where he would have had the rope.

"A greater scandal," he went on, both to Rachel and to the lady on his other side (who interrupted Mr. Venables to express devout agreement), "a greater scandal and miscarriage of justice I have never known. Guilty? Of course she was guilty; and I only wish we could try her again and hang her yet! Now don't pretend you sympathize with a woman like that," he said to Rachel, with a look like a nudge; "you haven't been married long enough; and for Heaven's sake don't refuse that bird! It's the best that can be got this time of year, though that's not saying much; but wait till the grouse season, Mrs. Steel! I have a moor here in the dales, keep a cellar full of them, and eat 'em as they drop off the string."

"Well?" said Rachel, turning to Langholm when her host became a busy man once more.

"I should make her guilty," said the novelist; "and she would marry a man who believed in her innocence, and he wouldn't care two pins when she told him the truth in the last chapter, and they would live happily ever afterwards. Nobody would touch the serial rights. But that would be a book!"

"Then do you think she really was guilty?"

And Rachel waited while he shrugged, her heart beating for no good reason that she knew, except that she rather liked Mr. Langholm, and did not wish to cease liking him on the spot. But it was to him that the answer was big with fate; and he trifled and dallied with the issue of the moment, little dreaming what a mark it was to leave upon his life, while the paradox beloved of the literary took shape on his tongue.

"What does it matter what she was? What do the facts matter, Mrs. Steel, when one has an idea like that for fiction? Fiction is truer than fact!"

"But you haven't answered my question."

Rachel meant to have that answer.

"Oh, well, as a matter of fact, I read the case pretty closely, and I was thankful the jury brought in an acquittal. It required a little imagination, but the truth always does. It is no treason to our host to whisper that he has none. I remember having quite a heated argument with him at the time. Oh, dear, no; she was no more guilty than you or I; but it would be a thousand times more artistic if she were; and I should make her so, by Jove!"

Rachel finished her dinner in great tranquillity after this; but there was a flush upon her face which had not been there before, and Langholm received an astonishing smile when the ladies rose. He had been making tardy atonement for his neglect of the aquiline lady, but Rachel had the last word with him.

"You will come and see us, won't you?" she said. "I shall want to hear how the plot works out."

"I am afraid it's one I can't afford to use," he said, "unless I stick to foolish fact and make her innocent."

And she left him with a wry face, her own glowing again.

"You looked simply great—especially towards the end," whispered Morna Woodgate in the drawing-room, for she alone knew how nervous Rachel had been about what was indeed her social debut in Delverton.

The aquiline lady also had a word to say. Her eyes were like brown beads, and her nose very long, which gave her indeed a hawk-like appearance, somewhat unusual in a woman; but her gravity was rather that of the owl.

"You talked a great deal to Mr. Langholm," said she, sounding her rebuke rather cleverly in the key of mere statement of fact. "Have you read his books, Mrs. Steel?"

"Some of them," said Rachel; "haven't you?"

"Oh, no, I never read novels, unless it be George Eliot, or in these days Mrs. Humphrey Ward. It's such waste of time when there are Browning, Ruskin, and Carlyle to read and read again. I know I shouldn't like Mr. Langholm's; I am sure they are dreadfully uncultured and sensational."

"But I like sensation," Rachel said. "I like to be taken out of myself."

"So you suggested he should write a novel about Mrs. Minchin!"

"No, I didn't suggest it," said Rachel, hurriedly; but the beady brown eyes were upon her, and she felt herself reddening horribly as she spoke.

"You seemed to know all about her," said the aquiline lady. "I'm not in the habit of reading such cases. But I must really look this one up."

CHAPTER XII

EPISODE OF THE INVISIBLE VISITOR

That was something like a summer, as the saying is, and for once they could say it even on the bleak northern spurs of the Delverton Hills. There were days upon days when that minor chain looked blue and noble as the mountains of Alsace and hackneyed song, seen with an envious eye from the grimy outskirts of Northborough, and when from the hills themselves the only blot upon the fair English landscape was the pall of smoke that always overhung the town. On such days Normanthorpe House justified its existence in the north of England instead of in southern Italy; the marble hall, so chill to the tread at the end of May, was the one really cool spot in the district by the beginning of July; and nowhere could a more delightful afternoon be spent by those who cared to avail themselves of a general invitation.

The Steels had not as yet committed themselves to formal hospitality of the somewhat showy character that obtained in the neighborhood, but they kept open house for all who liked to come, and whom they themselves liked well enough to ask in the first instance. And here (as in some other matters) this curious pair discovered a reflex identity of taste, rare enough in the happiest of conventional couples, but a gratuitous irony in the makers of a merely nominal marriage. Their mutual feelings towards each other were a quantity unknown to either; but about a third person they were equally outspoken and unanimous. Thus they had fewer disagreements than many a loving couple, and perhaps more points of insignificant contact, while all the time there was not even the pretence of love between them. Their lives made a chasm bridged by threads.

This was not seen by more than two of their acquaintance. Morna Woodgate had both the observation and the opportunities to see a little how the land lay between them. Charles Langholm had the experience and the imagination to guess a good deal. But it was little enough that Morna saw, and Langholm's guesses were as wide of the mark as only the guesses of an imaginative man can be. As for all the rest—honest Hugh Woodgate, the Venables girls, and their friends the young men in the various works, who saw the old-fashioned courtesy with which Steel always treated his wife, and the grace and charm of her consideration for him—they were every one receiving a liberal object lesson in matrimony, as some of them even realized at the time.

"I wish I could learn to treat my wife as Steel does his," sighed the good vicar, once when he had been inattentive at the table, and Morna had rebuked him in fun. "That would be my ideal—if I wasn't too old to learn!"

"Then thank goodness you are," rejoined his wife. "Let me catch you dancing in front of me to open the doors, Hugh, and I shall keep my eye on you as I've never kept it yet!"

But Rachel herself did not dislike these little graces, partly because they were not put on to impress an audience, but were an incident of their private life as well; and partly because they stimulated a study to which she had only given herself since their return to England and their establishment at Normanthorpe House. This was her study of the man who was still calmly studying her; she was returning the compliment at last.

And of his character she formed by degrees some remote conception; he was Steel by name and steel by nature, as the least observant might discern, and the least witty remark; a grim inscrutability was his dominant note; he was darkly alert, mysteriously vigilant, a measurer of words, a governor of glances; and yet, with all his self-mastery and mastery of others, there were human traits that showed themselves from time to time as the months wore on. Rachel did not recognize among these that studious consideration which she could still appreciate; it seemed rather part of a preconceived method of treating his wife, and the wary eye gleamed through it all. But it has been mentioned that Rachel at one time had a voice, of which high hopes had been formed by inexperienced judges. It was only at Normanthorpe that her second husband became aware of her possession, one afternoon when she fancied that she had the house to herself. So two could play at the game of consistent concealment! He could not complain; it was in the bond, and he never said a word. But he stood outside the window till she was done, for Rachel saw him in a mirror, and for many an afternoon to come he would hover outside the same window at the same time.

Why had he married her? Did he care for her, or did he not? What could be the object of that extraordinary step? Rachel was as far from hitting upon a feasible solution of these mysteries as she was from penetrating the deeper one of his own past life. Sometimes she put the like questions to herself; but they were more easily answered. She had been in desperate straits, in reckless despair; even if her second marriage had turned out no better than her first, she could not have been worse off than she was on the night of her acquittal; but she had been very well off ever since. Then there had been the incentive of adventure, the fascination of that very mystery which was a mystery still. And then—yes!—there had been the compelling will of a nature infinitely stronger than her own or any other that she had ever known.

Did she regret this second marriage, this second leap in the dark? No, she could not honestly pretend that she did; yet it had its sufficiently sinister side, its occasional admixture of sheer horror. But this was only when the mysteries which encompassed her happened to prey upon nerves unstrung by some outwardly exciting cause; it was then she would have given back all that he had ever given her to pierce the veil of her husband's past. Here, however, the impulse was more subtle; it was not the mere consuming curiosity which one in Rachel's position was bound to feel; it was rather a longing to be convinced that that veil hid nothing which should make her shudder to live under the same roof with this man.

Of one thing she was quite confident; wherever her husband had spent or misspent his life (if any part of so successful a whole could really have been misspent), it was not in England. He was un-English in a hundred superficial ways—in none that cut deep. With all his essential cynicism, there was the breadth and tolerance of a travelled man. Cosmopolitan on the other hand, he could not be called; he had proved himself too poor a linguist in every country that they had visited. It was only now, in their home life, that Rachel received hints of the truth, and it filled her with vague alarms, for that seemed to her to be the last thing he need have kept to himself.

One day she saw him ride a fractious horse, not because he was fond of riding, but because nobody in the stables could cope with this animal. Steel tamed it in ten minutes. But a groom remarked upon the shortness of his stirrups, in Rachel's hearing, and on the word a flash of memory lit up her brain. All at once she remembered the incident of the gum-leaves, soon after their arrival; he had told Morna what they were, yet to his wife he had pretended not to know. If he also was an Australian, why on earth should that fact, of all facts, be concealed from her? Nor had it merely been concealed; it was a point upon which Rachel had been deliberately misled, and the only one she could recall.

She was still brooding over it when a fresh incident occurred, which served not only to confirm her suspicions in this regard, but to deepen and intensify the vague horror with which her husband's presence sometimes inspired her.

Mr. Steel was an exceptionally early riser. It was his boast that he never went to sleep a second time; and one of his nearest approaches to a confidence was the remark that he owed something to that habit. Now Rachel, who was a bad sleeper, kept quite a different set of hours, and was seldom seen outside her own rooms before the forenoon. One magnificent morning, however, she was tempted to dress and make the best of the day which she had watched breaking shade by shade. The lawns were gray with dew; the birds were singing as they never sing twice in one summer's day. Rachel thought that for once she would like to be up and out before the sun was overpowering. And she proceeded to fulfil her wish.

All had been familiar from the window; all was unfamiliar on the landing and the stairs. No one had been down; the blinds were all drawn; a clock ticked like a sledge-hammer in the hall. Rachel ran downstairs like a mouse, and almost into the arms of her husband, whom she met coming out of the dining-room with a loaded tray. Another would have dropped it; with Steel there was not so much as a rattle of the things, but his color changed, and Rachel had not yet had such a look as he gave her with his pursed mouth and his flashing eyes.

"What does this mean?" he demanded, in the tone of distant thunder, with little less than lightning in his glance.

"I think that's for me to ask," laughed Rachel, standing up to him with a nerve that surprised herself. "I didn't know that you began so early!"

A decanter and a glass were among the things upon the tray.

"And I didn't know it of you," he retorted. "Why are you up?"

Rachel told him the simple truth in simple fashion. His tone of voice did not hurt her; there was no opposite extreme of tenderness to call to mind for the contrast which inflicts the wound. On the other hand, there was a certain satisfaction in having for once ruffled that smooth mien and smoother tongue; it was one of her rare glimpses of the real man, but as usual it was a glimpse and nothing more.

"I must apologize," said Steel, with an artificiality which was seldom so transparent; "my only excuse is that you startled me out of my temper and my manners. And I was upset to begin with. I have a poor fellow in rather a bad way in the boathouse."

"Not one of the gardeners, I hope?" queried Rachel; but her kind anxiety subsided in a moment, for his dark eyes were measuring her, his dark mind meditating a lie; and now she knew him well enough to read him thus far in his turn.

"No," replied Steel, deciding visibly against the lie; "no, not one of our men, or anybody else belonging to these parts; but some unlucky tramp, whom I imagine some of our neighbors would have given into custody forthwith. I found him asleep on the lawn; of course he had no business upon the premises; but he's so far gone that I'm taking him something to pull him together before I turn him off."

"I should have said," remarked Rachel, thoughtfully, "that tea or coffee would have been better for him than spirits."

Steel smiled indulgently across the tray.

"Most ladies would say the same," he replied, "but very few men."

"And why didn't you bring him into the house," pursued Rachel, looking her husband very candidly in the face, "instead of taking him all that way to the lake, and giving yourself so much more trouble than was necessary?"

The smile broadened upon Steel's thin lips, perhaps because it had entirely vanished from his glittering eyes.

"That," said he, "is a question you would scarcely ask if you had seen the poor creature for yourself. I don't intend you to see him; he is a rather saddening spectacle, and one of a type for which one can do absolutely nothing permanent. And now, if you are quite satisfied, I shall proceed, with your permission, to get rid of him in my own way."

It was seldom indeed that Steel descended to a display of sarcasm at his wife's expense, though few people who came much in contact with him escaped an occasional flick from a tongue that could be as bitter as it was habitually smooth. His last words were therefore as remarkable as his first; both were exceptions to a rule; and though Rachel moved away without replying, feeling that there was indeed no more to be said, she could not but dwell upon the matter in her mind. Satisfied she certainly was not; and yet there was so much mystery between them, so many instinctive reservations upon either side, that very little circumstance of the kind could not carry an ulterior significance, but many must be due to mere force of habit.

Rachel hated the condition of mutual secretiveness upon which she had married this man; it was antagonistic to her whole nature; she longed to repudiate it, and to abolish all secrets between them. But there her pride stepped in and closed her lips; and the intolerable thought that she would value her husband's confidence more than he would value hers, that she felt drawn to him despite every sinister attribute, would bring humiliation and self-loathing in its train. It was the truth, however, or, at all events, part of the truth.

Yet a more unfair arrangement Rachel had been unable to conceive, ever since the fatally reckless moment in which she had acquiesced in this one. The worst that could be known about her was known to her husband before her marriage; she had nothing else to hide; all concealment of the past, as between themselves, was upon his side. But matters were coming to a crisis in this respect; and, when Rachel deemed it done with, this incident of the tramp was only just begun.

It seemed that the servants knew of it, and that it was not Steel who had originally discovered the sleeping intruder, but an under-gardener, who, seeing his master also up and about, had prudently inquired what was to be done with the man before meddling with him.

"And the master said, 'leave him to me,'" declared Rachel's maid, who was her informant on the point, as she combed out her mistress's beautiful brown hair, before the late breakfast which did away with luncheon when there were no visitors at Normanthorpe.

"And did he do so?" inquired Rachel, looking with interest into her own eyes in the glass. "Did he leave him to your master?"

"He did that!" replied her maid, a simple Yorkshire wench, whom Rachel herself had chosen in preference to the smart town type. "Catch any on 'em not doin what master tells them!"

"Then did John see what happened?"

"No, m'm—because master sent him to see if the chap'd come in at t' lodge gates, or where, and when he got back he was gone, blanket an' all, an' master with him."

"Blanket and all!" repeated Rachel. "Do you mean to say he had the impudence to bring a blanket with him?"

"And slept in it!" cried her excited little maid. "John says he found him tucked up in a corner of the lawn, out of the wind, behind some o' them shrubs, sound asleep, and lapped round and round in his blue banket from head to heel."

Rachel saw her own face change in the glass; but she only asked one more question, and that with a smile.

"Did John say it was a blue blanket, Harris, or did your own imagination supply the color?"

"He said it, m'm; faded blue."

"And pray when did you see John to hear all this?" demanded Rachel, suddenly remembering her responsibility as mistress of this young daughter of the soil.

"Deary me, m'm," responded the ingenuous Harris, "I didn't see him, not more than any of the others; he just comed to t' window of t' servants' hall, as we were having our breakfasts, and he told us all at once. He was that full of it, was John!"

Rachel asked no more questions; but she was not altogether sorry that the matter had already become one of common gossip throughout the house. Meanwhile she made no allusion to it at breakfast, but her observation had been quickened by the events of the morning, and thus it was that she noticed and recognized the narrow blue book which was too long for her husband's breast-pocket, and would show itself as he stooped over his coffee. It was his check-book, and Rachel had not seen it since their travels.

That afternoon a not infrequent visitor arrived on his bicycle, to which was tied a bouquet of glorious roses instead of a lamp; this was Charles Langholm, the novelist, who had come to live in Delverton, over two hundred miles from his life-long haunts and the literary market-place, chiefly because upon a happy-go-lucky tour through the district he had chanced upon what he never tired of calling "the ideal rose-covered cottage of my dreams," though also for other reasons unknown in Yorkshire. His flat was abandoned before quarter-day, his effects transplanted at considerable cost, and ever since Langholm had been a bigoted countryman, who could not spend a couple of days in town without making himself offensive on the subject at his club, where he was nevertheless discreetly vague as to the exact locality of his rural paradise. Even at the club, however, it was admitted that his work had improved almost as much as his appearance; and he put it all down to the roses in which he lived embowered for so many months of the year. Such was their profusion that you could have filled a clothes-basket without missing one, and Langholm never visited rich or poor without a little offering out of his abundance.

"They may be coals to Newcastle," he would say to the Woodgates or the Steels, "but none of your Tyneside collieries are a patch on mine."

Like most victims of the artistic temperament, the literary Langholm was a creature of moods; but the very fact of a voluntary visit from him was sufficient guarantee of the humor in which he came, and this afternoon he was at his best. He had indeed been writing all day, and for many days past, and was filled with the curious exhilaration which accompanies an output too rapid and too continuous to permit a running sense of the defects. He was a ship with a fair wind, which he valued the more for the belts of calms and the adverse weather through which he had passed and must inevitably pass again; for the moment he was a happy man, though one with no illusion as to the present product of his teeming pen.

"It is nonsense," he said to Rachel, in answer to a question from that new and sympathetic friend, "but it is not such nonsense as to seem nothing else when one's in the act of perpetrating it, and what more can one want? It had to be done by the tenth of August, and by Jove it will be! A few weeks ago I didn't think it possible; but the summer has thawed my ink."

"Are you sure it isn't Mrs. Steel?" asked one of the Venables girls, who had also ridden over on their bicycles. "I heard you had a tremendously literary conversation when you dined with us."

"We had, indeed!" said Langholm, with enthusiasm. "And Mrs. Steel gave me one of the best ideas I ever had in my life; that's another reason why I'm racing through this rubbish—to take it in hand."

It was Sybil to whom he was speaking, but at this point Rachel plunged into the conversation with the sister, Vera, which required an effort, since the elder Miss Venables was a young lady who had cultivated languor as a sign of breeding and sophistication. Rachel, however, made the effort with such a will that the talk became general in a moment.

"I don't know how anybody writes books," was the elder young lady's solitary contribution; her tone added that she did not want to know.

"Nor I," echoed Sybil, "especially in a place like this, where nothing ever happens. If I wanted to write a novel, I should go to Spain—or Siberia—or the Rocky Mountains—where things do happen, according to all accounts."

"Young lady," returned the novelist, a twinkle in his eye, "I had exactly the same notion when I first began, and I remember what a much older hand said to me when I told him I was going down to Cornwall for romantic background. 'Young man,' said he, 'have you placed a romance in your mother's backyard yet?' I had not, but I did so at once instead of going to Cornwall, and sounder advice I never had in my life. Material, like charity, begins at home; nor need you suppose that nothing ever happens down here. That is the universal idea of the native about his or her own heath, but I can assure you it isn't the case at all. Only just now, on my way here, I saw a scene and a character that might have been lifted bodily out of Bret Harte."

Sybil Venables clamored for particulars, while her sister resigned herself to further weariness of the flesh. Rachel put down her cup and leant forward with curiously expectant eyes. They were sitting in the cool, square hall, with doors shut or open upon every hand, and the gilded gallery overhead. Statuettes and ferns, all reflected in the highly polished marble floor, added a theatrical touch which was not out of keeping with a somewhat ornate interior.

"It was the character," continued Langholm, "who was making the scene; and a stranger creature I have never seen on English earth. He wore what I believe they call a Crimean shirt, and a hat like a stage cowboy; and he informed all passers that he was knocking down his check!"

"What?" cried Rachel and Sybil in one breath, but in curiously different tones.

"Knocking down his check," repeated Langholm. "It's what they do in the far west or the bush or somewhere—but I rather fancy it's the bush—when they get arrears of wages in a lump in one check."

"And where did you see all this?" inquired Rachel, whose voice was very quiet, but her hazel eyes alight with a deeper interest than the story warranted.

"At the Packhorse on the York Road. I came that way round for the sake of the surface and the exercise."

"And did you see the check?"

"No, I only stopped for a moment, to find out what the excitement was about; but the fellow I can see now. You never set eyes on such a pirate—gloriously drunk and bearded to the belt. I didn't stop, because he was lacing into everybody with a cushion, and the local loafers seemed to like it."

"What a joke!" cried Sybil Venables.

"There is no accounting for taste," remarked her sapient sister.

"And he was belaboring them with a cushion, did you say?" added Rachel, with the slightest emphasis upon the noun.

"Well, it looked like one to me," replied Langholm, "but, on second thoughts, it was more like a bolster in shape; and now I know what it was! It has just dawned on me. It looked like a bolster done up in a blanket; but it was the swag that the tramps carry in Australia, with all their earthly goods rolled up in their bedding; and the fellow was an Australian swagsman, that's what he was!"

"Swagman," corrected Rachel, instinctively. "And pray what color was the blanket?" she made haste to add.

"Faded blue."

And, again from sheer force of instinct, Rachel gave a nod.

"Were you ever out there, Mrs. Steel?" inquired Langholm, carelessly. "I never was, but the sort of thing has been done to death in books, and I only wonder I didn't recognize it at once. Well, it was the last type one thought to meet with in broad daylight on an English country road!"

Had Langholm realized that he had put a question which he had no business to put? Had he convicted himself of a direct though unpremeditated attempt to probe the mystery of his hostess's antecedents, and were his subsequent observations designed to unsay that question in effect? If so, there was no such delicacy in the elder Miss Venables, who became quite animated at the sudden change in Rachel's face, and at her own perception of the cause.

"Have you been to Australia, Mrs. Steel?" repeated Vera, looking Rachel full in the eyes; and she added slyly, "I believe you have!"

There was a moment's pause, and then a crisp step rang upon the marble, as Mr. Steel emerged from his study.

"Australia, my dear Miss Venables," said he, "is the one country that neither my wife nor I have ever visited in our lives, and the last one that either of us has the least curiosity to see."

And he took his seat among them with a smile.

CHAPTER XIII

THE AUSTRALIAN ROOM

It was that discomfort to man, that cruelty to beast, that outrage by unnatural Nature upon all her children—a bitter summer's day. The wind was in the east; great swollen clouds wallowed across the sky, now without a drop, now breaking into capricious showers of stinging rain; and a very occasional burst of sunlight served only to emphasize the evil by reminding one of the season it really was, or should have been, even if it did not entice one to the wetting which was the sure reward of a walk abroad. The Delverton air was strong and bracing enough, but the patron wind of the district bit to the bone through garments never intended for winter wear.

On such a day there could be few more undesirable abodes than Normanthorpe House, with its marble floors, its high ceilings, and its general scheme of Italian coolness and discomfort. It was a Tuesday, when Mr. Steel usually amused himself by going on 'Change in Northborough and lunching there at the Delverton Club. Rachel was thus not only physically chilled and depressed, but thrown upon her own society at its worst; and she missed that of her husband more than she was aware.

Once she had been a bright and energetic person with plenty of resources within herself; now she had singularly few. She was distraught and uneasy in her mind, could settle less and less to her singing or a book, and was the victim of an increasing restlessness of mind and limb. Others did not see it; she had self-control; but repression was no cure. And for all this there were reasons enough; but the fear of identification by the neighbors as the notorious Mrs. Minchin was no longer one of them.

No; it was her own life, root and branch, that had grown into the upas-tree which was poisoning existence for Rachel Steel. She was being punished for her second marriage as she had been punished for her first, only more deservedly, and with more subtle stripes. Each day brought a dozen tokens of the anomalous position which she had accepted in the madness of an hour of utter recklessness and desperation. Rachel was not mistress in her own house, nor did she feel for a moment that it was her own house at all. Everything was done for her; a skilled housekeeper settled the smallest details; and that these were perfect alike in arrangement and execution, that the said housekeeper was a woman of irreproachable tact and capability, and that she herself had never an excuse for concrete complaint, formed a growing though intangible grievance in Rachel's mind. She had not felt it at first. She had changed in these summer months. She wanted to be more like other wives. There was Morna Woodgate, with the work cut out for every hour of her full and happy days; but Morna had not made an anomalous marriage, Morna had married for love.

And to-day there was not even Morna to come and see her, or for her to go and see, for Tuesday afternoon was not one of the few upon which the vicar's wife had no settled duty or occupation in the parish. Rachel so envied her the way in which she helped her husband in his work; she had tried to help also, in a desultory way; but it is one thing to do a thing because it is a duty, and another thing to do it for something to do, as Rachel soon found out. Besides, Hugh Woodgate was not her husband. Rachel had the right feeling to abandon those half-hearted attempts at personal recreation in the guise of good works, and the courage to give Morna her reasons; but she almost regretted it this afternoon.

She had explored for the twentieth time that strange treasury known as the Chinese Room, a state apartment filled with loot brought home from the Flowery Land by a naval scion of the house of Normanthorpe, and somewhat cynically included in the sale. The idols only leered in Rachel's face, and the cabinets of grotesque design were unprovided with any key to their history of former uses. In sheer desperation Rachel betook herself to her husband's study; it was the first time she had crossed that threshold in his absence, but within were the books, and a book she must have.

These also had been purchased with the house. With few exceptions, they were ancient books in battered calf, which Steel had stigmatized as "musty trash" once when Rachel had asked him if she might take one. She had not made that request again; indeed, it was seldom enough that she had set foot inside the spacious room which the old books lined, and in which the master of the house disliked being disturbed. Yet it was anything but trash which she now discovered upon the dusty shelves.

There was Tom Jones in four volumes and the Spectator in eight, Gil Blas and the works of Swift, all with the long "s," and backs like polished oak; in the lower shelves were Hogarth and Gillray in rare folios; at every level and on either hand were books worth taking out. But this was almost all that Rachel did; she took them out and put them in again, for that was her unsettled mood. She spent some minutes over the Swifts, but not sufficiently attracted to march off with them. The quaint, obsolete type of the various volumes attracted her more as a curiosity than as readable print; the coarse satires of the early masters of caricature and cartoon did not attract her at all. Rachel's upbringing had deprived her of the traditions, the superstitions, and the shibboleths which are at once a strength and a weakness of the ordinary English education; if, however, she was too much inclined to take a world's masterpiece exactly as she found it, her taste, such as it was, at all events was her own.

She had naturally an open mind, but it was not open now; it was full and running over with the mysteries and the perplexities of her own environment. Books would not take her out of herself; in them she could not hope to find a key to any one of the problems within problems which beset and tortured her. So she ran her hand along the dusty books, little dreaming that the key was there all the time; so in the end, and quite by chance, but for the fact that she was dipping into so many, she took out the right book, and started backward with it in her hand.

The book was The Faerie Queene, and Rachel had extracted it in a Gothic spirit, because she had once heard that very few living persons had read it from end to end; since she could not become interested in anything, she might as well be thoroughly bored. But she never opened the volume, for in the dark slit which it left something shone like a little new moon. Rachel put in her hand, and felt a small brass handle; to turn and pull it was the work of her hand without a guiding thought; but when tiers of books swung towards her with the opening door which they hid, it was not in human nature to shut that door again without so much as peeping in.

Rachel first peeped, then stepped, into a secret chamber as disappointing at the first glance as such a place could possibly be. It was deep in dust, and filled with packing-cases not half unpacked, a lumber-room and nothing more. The door swung to with a click behind her as Rachel stood in the midst of this uninteresting litter, and instinctively she turned round. That instant she stood rooted to the ground, her eyes staring, her chin fallen, a dreadful fear in every feature of her face.

It was not that her second husband had followed and discovered her; it was the face of her first husband that looked upon Rachel Steel, his bold eyes staring into hers, through the broken glass of a fly-blown picture-frame behind the door.

The portrait was not hanging from the wall, but resting against it on the floor. It was a photographic enlargement in colors, and the tinted eyes looked up at Rachel with all the bold assurance that she remembered so keenly in the perished flesh. She had not an instant's doubt about those eyes; they spoke in a way that made her shiver; and yet the photograph was that of a much younger man than she had married. It was Alexander Minchin with mutton-chop whiskers, his hair parted in the middle, and the kind of pin in the kind of tie which had been practically obsolete for years; it was none the less indubitably and indisputably Alexander Minchin.

And indeed that fact alone was enough to shake Rachel's nerves; her discovery had all the shock of an unwelcome encounter with the living. But it was the gradual appreciation of the true significance of her discovery that redoubled Rachel's qualms even as she was beginning to get the better of them. So they had been friends, her first husband and her second! Rachel stooped and looked hard at the enlargement, and there sure enough was the photographer's imprint. Yes, they had been friends in Australia, that country which John Buchanan Steel elaborately and repeatedly pretended never to have visited in all his travels!

Rachel could have smiled as she drew herself up with this point settled in her mind for ever; why, the room reeked of Australia! These cases had never been properly unpacked, they were overflowing with memorials of the life which she herself knew so well. Here a sheaf of boomerangs were peeping out; there was an old gray wide-awake, with a blue-silk fly-veil coiled above the brim; that was an Australian saddle; and those glass cases contained samples of merino wool. So it was in Australia as a squatter that Steel had made his fortune! But why suppress a fact so free from all discredit? These were just the relics of a bush life which a departing colonist might care to bring home with him to the old country. Then why cast them into a secret lumber-room whose very existence was unknown to the old Australian's Australian wife?

Rachel felt her brain reeling; and yet she was thankful for the light which had been vouchsafed to her at last. It was but a lantern flash through the darkness, which seemed the more opaque for that one thin beam of light; but it was something, a beginning, a clew. For the rest she was going straight to the man who had kept her so long in such unnecessary ignorance.

Why had he not told her about Australia, at all events? What conceivable harm could that have done? It would have been the strongest possible bond between them. But Rachel went further as she thought more. Why not have told her frankly that he had known Alexander Minchin years before she did herself? It could have made no difference after Alexander Minchin's death; then why had he kept the fact so jealously to himself? And the dead man's painted eyes answered "Why?" with the bold and mocking stare his wife could not forget, a stare which at that moment assumed a new and sinister significance in her sight.

Rachel looked upward through the window, which was barred, and almost totally eclipsed by shrubs; but a clout of sky was just visible under the architrave. It was a very gray sky; gray also was Rachel's face in the sudden grip of horror and surmise. Then a ragged edge of cloud caught golden fire, a glimmer found its way into the dust and dirt of the secret chamber, and Rachel relaxed with a slight smile but an exceedingly decided shake of the head. Thereafter she escaped incontinently, but successfully, as she had entered; closed the hidden door behind her, and restored The Faerie Queene very carefully to its place. Rachel no longer proposed to join the select band of those who have read that epic through.

CHAPTER XIV

BATTLE ROYAL

She went to her own rooms to think and to decide; and what she first thought and then decided was sensible enough. She was thankful she had not been caught like Fatima in the forbidden room; not that she lacked the courage to meet the consequences of her acts, but it would have put her in the wrong and at a disadvantage at the first crash of battle. And a battle royal Rachel quite expected; nor had she the faintest intention of disguising what she had done; but it was her husband who was to be taken aback, for a change.

The Steels dined alone, as usual, or as much alone as a man and his wife with a butler and two footmen are permitted to be at their meals. Steel was at his best after these jaunts of his to Northborough and the club. He would come home with the latest news from that centre of the universe, the latest gossip which had gone the rounds on 'Change and at lunch, the newest stories of Mr. Venables and his friends, which were invariably reproduced for Rachel's benefit with that slight but unmistakable local accent of which these gentry were themselves all unconscious. Steel had a wicked wit, and Rachel as a rule a sufficiently appreciative smile, but this was to-night either lacking altogether or of an unconvincing character. Rachel could never pretend, and her first spontaneous remark was when her glass filled up with froth.

"Champagne!" said she, for they seldom drank it.

"It has been such a wretched day," explained Steel, "that I ordered it medicinally. I am afraid it must have been perishing here, as it was in the town. This is to restore your circulation."

"My circulation is all right," answered Rachel, too honest even to smile upon the man with whom she was going to war. "I felt cold all the morning, but I have been warm enough since the afternoon."

And that was very true, for excitement had made her blood run hot in every vein; nor had Rachel often been more handsome, or less lovely, than she was to-night, with her firm lip and her brooding eye.

"There was another reason for the champagne," resumed her husband, very frankly for him, when at last they had the drawing-room to themselves. "I am in disgrace with you, I believe, and I want to hear from you what I have done."

"It is what you have not done," returned Rachel, as she stood imperiously before the lighted fire; and her bosom rose and fell, white as the ornate mantelpiece of Carrara marble which gleamed behind her.

"And what, may I ask, is my latest sin of omission?"

Rachel rushed to the point with a passionate directness that did her no discredit.

"Why have you pretended all these months that you never were in Australia in your life? Why did you never tell me that you knew Alexander Minchin out there?"

And she held her breath against the worst that he could do, being well prepared for him to lose first his color and then the temper which he had never lost since she had known him; to fly into a fury, to curse her up hill and down dale—in a word, to behave as her first husband had done more than once, but this one never. What Rachel did not anticipate was a smile that cloaked not a single particle of surprise, and the little cocksure bow that accompanied the smile.

"So you have found it out," said Steel, and his smile only ended as he sipped his coffee; even then there was no end to it in his eyes.

"This afternoon," said Rachel, disconcerted but not undone.

"By poking your nose into places which you would not think of approaching in my presence?"

"By the merest accident in the world!"

And Rachel described the accident, truth flashing from her eyes; in an instant her husband's face changed, the smile went out, but it was no frown that came in its stead.

"I beg your pardon, Rachel," said he, earnestly. "I suppose," he added, "that a man may call his wife by her Christian name for once in a way? I did so, however, without thinking, and because I really do most humbly beg your pardon for an injustice which I have done you for some hours in my own mind. I came home between three and four, and I heard you were in my study. You were not, but that book was out; and then, of course, I knew where you were. My hand was on the knob, but I drew it back. I wondered if you would have the pluck to do the tackling! And I apologize again," Steel concluded, "for I knew you quite well enough to have also known that at least there was no question about your courage."

"Then," said Rachel, impulsively, after having made up her mind to ignore these compliments, "then I think you might at least be candid with me!"

"And am I not?" he cried. "Have I denied that the portrait you saw is indeed the portrait of Alexander Minchin? And yet how easy that would have been! It was taken long before you knew him; he must have altered considerably after that. Or I might have known him under another name. But no, I tell you honestly that your first husband was a very dear friend of mine, more years ago than I care to reckon. Did you hear me?" he added, with one of his sudden changes of tone and manner. "A very dear friend, I said, for that he undoubtedly was; but was I going to ask you to marry a very dear friend of the man who deteriorated so terribly, and who treated you so ill?"

Delivered in the most natural manner imaginable, with the quiet confidence of which this man was full, and followed by a smile of conscious yet not unkindly triumph, this argument, like most that fell from his lips upon her ears, was invested with a value out of all proportion to its real worth; and Steel clinched it with one of those homely saws which are not disdained by makers of speeches the wide world over.

"Could you really think," he added, with one of his rarest and most winning smiles, "that I should be such a fool as to invite you to step out of the frying-pan into the fire?"

Rachel felt for a moment that she would like to say it was exactly what she had done; but even in that moment she perceived that such a statement would have been very far from the truth. And her nature was large enough to refrain from the momentary gratification of a bitter repartee. But he was too clever for her; that she did feel, whatever else he might be; and her only chance was to return to the plain questions with which she had started, demanding answers as plain. Rachel led up to them, however, with one or two of which she already knew the answer, thus preparing for her spring in quite the Old Bailey manner, which she had mastered subconsciously at her trial, and which for once was to profit a prisoner at the bar.

"Yet you don't any longer deny that you have been to Australia?"

"It is useless. I lived there for years."

"And you admit that you knew Alexander quite well out there?"

"Most intimately, in the Riverina, some fifteen or twenty years ago; he was on my station as almost everything a gentleman could be, up to overseer; and by that time he was half a son to me, and half a younger brother."

"But no relation, as a matter of fact?"

"None whatever, but my very familiar friend, as I have already told you."

"Then why in the world," Rachel almost thundered, "could you not tell me so in the beginning?"

"That is a question I have already answered."

"Then I have another. Why so often and so systematically pretend that you never were in Australia at all?"

"That is a question which I implore you not to press!"

The two answers, so like each other in verbal form, were utterly dissimilar in the manner of their utterance. Suddenly, and for the first time in all her knowledge of him, his cynical aplomb had fallen from the man like a garment. One moment he was brazening past deceit with a smiling face; the next, he was in earnest, even he, and that mocking voice vibrated with deep feeling.

"I should have thought all the more of you for being an Australian," continued Rachel, vaguely touched at the change in him, "I who am proud of being one myself. What harm could it have done, my knowing that?"

"You are not the only one from whom I have hidden it," said Steel, still in a low and altered voice.

"Yet you brought home all those keepsakes of the bush?"

"But I thought better of them, and have never even unpacked them all, as you must have seen for yourself."

"Yet your mysterious visitor of the other day—"

"Another Australian, of course; indeed, another man who worked upon my own run."

"And he knows why you don't want it known over here?"

"He does," said Steel, with grim brevity.

Rachel moved forward and pressed his hand impulsively. To her surprise the pressure was returned. That instant their hands fell apart.

"I beg your pardon in my turn," she said. "I can only promise you that I will never again reopen that wound—whatever it may be—and I won't even try to guess. I undertook not to try to probe your past, and I will keep my undertaking in the main; but where it impinges upon my own past I simply cannot! You say you were my first husband's close friend," added Rachel, looking her second husband more squarely than ever in the eyes. "Was that what brought you to my trial for his murder?"

He returned her look.

"It was."

"Was that what made you wish to marry me yourself?"

No answer, but his assurance coming back, as he stood looking at her under beetling eyebrows, over black arms folded across a snowy shirt. It was the wrong moment for the old Adam's return, for Rachel had reached the point upon which she most passionately desired enlightenment.

"I want to know," she cried, "and I insist on knowing, what first put it into your head or your heart to marry me—all but convicted—"

Steel held up his hand, glancing in apprehension towards the door.

"I have told you so often," he said, "and your glass tells you whenever you look into it. I sat within a few feet of you for the inside of a week!"

"But that is not true," she told him quietly; "trust a woman to know, if it were."

In the white glare of the electric light he seemed for once to change color slightly.

"If you will not accept my word," he answered, "there is no more to be said."

And he switched off a bunch of the lights that had beaten too fiercely upon him; but it only looked as if he was about to end the interview.

"You have admitted so many untruths in the last half hour," pursued Rachel, in a thrilling voice, "that you ought not to be hurt if I suspect you of another. Come! Can you look me in the face and tell me that you married me for love? No, you turn away—because you cannot! Then will you, in God's name, tell me why you did marry me?"

And she followed him with clasped hands, her beautiful eyes filled with tears, her white throat quivering with sobs, until suddenly he turned upon her as though in self-defence.

"No, I will not!" he cried. "Since the answer I have given you, and the obvious answer, is not good enough for you, the best thing you can do is to find out for yourself."

A truculent look came into Rachel's eyes, as they rested upon the smooth face so unusually agitated beneath the smooth silvery hair.

"I will!" she answered through her teeth. "I shall take you at your word, and find out for myself I will!"

And she swept past him out of the room.

"I will!" she answered through her teeth—and she swept past him out of the room.

CHAPTER XV

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

There was now an open breach between the Steels, but no third person would have discerned any difference in their relations. It was a mere snapping of the threads across the chasm which had always separated Rachel from her second husband. The chasm had been plain enough to those who came much in contact with the pair, but the little threads of sympathy were invisible to the naked eye of ordinary observation. There was thus no outward change, for neither was there any outward rupture. It takes two to quarrel, and Steel imperturbably refused to make one. Rachel might be as trying as she pleased; no repulse depressed, no caprice annoyed him; and this insensibility was not the least of Steel's offences in the now jaundiced eyes of his wife.

Rachel felt as bitter as one only does against those who have inspired some softer feeling; the poison of misplaced confidence rankled in her blood. Her husband had told her much, but it was not enough for Rachel, and the little he refused to tell eliminated all the rest from her mind. There was no merit even in such frankness as he had shown, since her own, accidental discoveries had forced some measure of honesty upon him. He had admitted nothing which Rachel could not have deduced from that which she had found out for herself. She felt as far as ever from any satisfactory clew to his mysterious reasons for ever wishing to marry her. There lay the kernel of the whole matter, there the problem that she meant to solve. If her first husband was at the bottom of it, no matter how indirectly, and if she had been married for the dead man's sake, to give his widow a home, then Rachel felt that the last affront had been put upon her, and she would leave this man as she had been within an ace of leaving his friend. So ran the wild and unreasonable tenor of her thoughts. He had not married her for her own sake; it was not she herself who had appealed to him, after all. Curiosity might consume her, and a sense of deepening mystery add terrors of its own, but the resentful feeling was stronger than either of these, and would have afforded as strange a revelation as any, had Rachel dared to look deeper into her own heart.

If, on the other hand, she had already some conception of the truth about herself, it would scarcely lessen her bitterness against one who inspired in her emotions at once so complex and so painful. Suffice it that this bitterness was extreme in the days immediately following the scene between Rachel and her husband in the drawing-room after dinner. It was also unconcealed, and must have been the cause of many another such scene but for the imperturable temper and the singularly ruly tongue of John Buchanan Steel. And then, in those same days, there fell the two social events to which the bidden guests had been looking forward for some two or three weeks, and of which the whole neighborhood was to talk for years.

On the tenth of August the Uniackes were giving a great garden party at Hornby Manor, while the eleventh was the date of the first real dinner-party for which the Steels had issued invitations to Normanthorpe House.

The tenth was an ideal August day: deep blue sky, trees still untarnished in the hardy northern air, and black shadows under the trees. Rachel made herself ready before lunch, to which she came down looking quite lovely, in blue as joyous as the sky's, to find her husband as fully prepared, and not less becomingly attired, in a gray frock-coat without a ripple on its surface. They looked critically at each other for an instant, and then Steel said something pleasant, to which Rachel made practically no reply. They ate their lunch in a silence broken good-naturedly at intervals from one end of the table only. Then the Woodgates arrived, to drive with them to Hornby, which was some seven or eight miles away; and the Normanthorpe landau and pair started with, the quartette shortly after three o'clock.

Morning, noon, and afternoon of this same tenth of August, Charles Langholm, the minor novelist, never lifted his unkempt head from the old bureau at which he worked, beside an open window overlooking his cottage garden. A tumbler of his beloved roses stood in one corner of the writing space, up to the cuts in MSS., and roses still ungathered peeped above the window-sill and drooped from either side. But Langholm had a soul far below roses at the present moment; his neatly numbered sheets of ruled sermon-paper were nearing the five hundredth page; his hero and his heroine were in the full sweep of those emotional explanations which they had ingeniously avoided for the last three hundred at least; in a word, Charles Langholm's new novel is being finished while you wait. It is not one of his best; yet a moment ago there was a tear in his eye, and now he is grinning like a child at play. And at play he is, though he be paid for playing, and though the game is only being won after weeks and months of uphill labor and downhill joy.

At last there is the final ticking of inverted commas, and Charles Langholm inscribes the autograph for which he is importuned once in a blue moon, and which the printer will certainly not set up at the foot of the last page; but the thing is done, and the doer must needs set his hand to it out of pure and unusual satisfaction with himself. And so, thank the Lord!

Langholm rose stiffly from the old bureau, where at his best he could lose all sense of time; for the moment he was bent double, and faint with fasting, because it was his mischievous rule to reach a given point before submitting to the physical and mental distraction of a meal. But to-day's given point had been the end of his book, and for some happy minutes Langholm fed on his elation. It was done at last, yet another novel, and not such a bad one after all. Not his best by any means, but perhaps still further from being his worst; and, at all events, the thing was done. Langholm could scarcely grasp that fact, though there was the last page just dry upon the bureau, and most of the rest lying about the room in galley-proofs or in typewritten sheets. Moreover, the publishers were pleased; that was the joke. It was nothing less to Langholm when he reflected that the final stimulus to finish this book had been the prospect and determination of at last writing one to please himself. And this reflection brought him down from his rosy clouds.

It was the day of the Uniacke's garden-party; they had actually asked the poor author, and the poor author had intended to go. Not that he either shone or revelled in society; but Mrs. Steel would be there, and he burned to tell her that he had finished his book, and was at last free to tackle hers; for hers at bottom it would be, the great novel by which the name of Langholm was to live, and which he was to found by Rachel Steel's advice upon the case of her namesake Rachel Minchin.

The coincidence of the Christian names had naturally struck the novelist, but no suspicion of the truth had crossed a mind too skilled in the construction of dramatic situations to dream of stumbling into one ready-made. It was thus with a heart as light as any feather that Langholm made a rapid and unwholesome meal, followed by a deliberate and painstaking toilet, after which he proceeded at a prudent pace upon his bicycle to Hornby Manor.

Flags were drooping from their poles, a band clashing fitfully through the sleepy August air, and carriages still sweeping into the long drive, when Langholm also made his humble advent. He was a little uneasy and self-conscious, and annoyed at his own anxiety to impart his tidings to Mrs. Steel, but for whom he would probably have stayed at home. His eye sought her eagerly as he set foot upon the lawn, having left his bicycle at the stables, and carefully removed the clips from his trousers; but before his vigilance could be rewarded he was despatched by his hostess to the tea-tent, in charge of a very young lady, detached for the nonce from the wing of a gaunt old gentleman with side whiskers and lantern jaws.

Fresh from his fagging task, Langholm did not know what on earth to say to the pretty schoolgirl, whose own shyness reacted on herself; but he was doing his best, and atoning in attentiveness for his shortcomings as a companion, when in the tent he had to apologize to a lady in blue, who turned out to be Rachel herself, with Hugh Woodgate at her side.

"Oh, no, we live in London," the young girl was saying; "only I go to the same school as Ida Uniacke, and I am staying here on a visit."

"I've finished it," whispered Langholm to Rachel, "this very afternoon; and now I'm ready for yours! I see," he added, dropping back into the attitude of respectful interest in the young girl; "only on a visit; and who was the old gentleman from whom I tore you away?"

The child laughed merrily.

"That was my father," she said; "but he is only here on his way to Leeds."

"You mustn't call it my book," remonstrated Rachel, while Woodgate waited upon both ladies.

"But it was you who gave me the idea of writing a novel round Mrs. Minchin."

"I don't think I did. I am quite sure it was your own idea. But one book at a time. Surely you will take a rest?"

"I shall correct this thing. It will depress me to the verge of suicide. Then I shall fall to upon my magnum opus."

"You really think it will be that?"

"It should be mine. It isn't saying much; but I never had such a plot as you have given me!"

Rachel shook her head in a last disclaimer as she moved away with the Vicar of Marley.

"Oh, Mr. Langholm, do you write books?" asked the schoolgirl, with round blue eyes.

"For my sins," he confessed. "But do you prefer an ice, or more strawberries and cream?"

"Neither, thank you. I've been here before," the young girl said with a jolly smile. "But I didn't know I should come back with an author!"

"Then we'll go out into the open air," the author said; and they followed Rachel at but a few yards' distance.

It was a picturesque if an aimless pageant, the smart frocks sweeping the smooth sward, the pretty parasols with the prettier faces underneath, the well-set-up and well-dressed men, with the old gray manor rising upon an eminence in the background, and a dazzling splash of scarlet and of brass somewhere under the trees. The band was playing selections from The Geisha as Langholm emerged from the tea-tent in Rachel's wake. Mrs. Venables was manoeuvring her two highly marriageable girls in opposite quarters of the field, and had only her own indefatigable generalship to thank for what it lost her upon this occasion. Mr. Steel and Mrs. Woodgate apparently missed the same thing through wandering idly in the direction of the band; but the tableau might have been arranged for the express benefit of Charles Langholm and the very young lady upon whom he was dancing laborious attendance.

Mrs. Uniacke had stepped apart from the tall old gentleman with the side whiskers, to whom she had been talking for some time, and had intercepted Rachel as she was passing on with Hugh Woodgate.

"Wait while I introduce you to my most distinguished guest, or rawther him to you," whispered Mrs. Uniacke, with the Irish brogue which rendered her slightest observation a delight to the appreciative. "Sir Baldwin Gibson—Mrs. Steel."

Langholm and the little Miss Gibson were standing close behind, and the trained eye of the habitual observer took in every detail of a scene which he never forgot. Handsome Mrs. Uniacke was clinching the introduction with a smile, which ended in a swift expression of surprise. Sir Baldwin had made an extraordinary pause, his hand half way to his hat, his lantern jaws fallen suddenly apart. Mrs. Steel, though slower at her part of the obvious recognition, was only a second slower, and thereupon stood abashed and ashamed in the eyes of all who saw; but only for another second at the most; then Sir Baldwin Gibson not only raised his hat, but held out his hand in a fatherly way, and as she took it Rachel's color changed from livid white to ruby red.

Yet even Rachel was mistress of herself so quickly that the one or two eye-witnesses of this scene, such as Mrs. Uniacke and Charles Langholm, who saw that it had a serious meaning, without dreaming what that meaning was, were each in hopes that no one else had seen as much as they. Sir Baldwin plunged at once into amiable and fluent conversation, and before many moments Rachel's replies were infected with an approximate assurance and ease; then Langholm turned to his juvenile companion, and put a question in the form of a fib.

"So that is your father," said he. "I seem, do you know, to know his face?"

Little Miss Gibson fell an easy prey.

"You probably do; he is the judge, you know!"

"The judge, is he?"

"Yes; and I wanted to ask you something just now in the tent. Did you mean the Mrs. Minchin who was tried for murder, when you were talking about your plot?"

Langholm experienced an unforeseen shock from head to heel; he could only nod.

"He was the judge who tried her!" the schoolgirl said with pardonable pride.

A lady joined them as they spoke.

"Do you really mean that that is Mr. Justice Gibson, who tried Mrs. Minchin at the Old Bailey last November?"

"Yes—my father," said the proud young girl.

"What a very singular thing! How do you do, Mr. Langholm? I didn't see it was you."

And Langholm found himself shaking hands with the aquiline lady to whom he had talked so little at the Upthorpe dinner-party; she took her revenge by giving him only the tips of her fingers now, and by looking deliberately past him at Rachel and her judge.

CHAPTER XVI

A MATCH FOR MRS. VENABLES

That was absolutely all that happened at the Uniackes' garden-party. There was no scene, no scandal, no incident whatsoever beyond an apparently mutual recognition between Mrs. Steel and Mr. Justice Gibson. Of this there were not half-a-dozen witnesses, all of whom were given immediate reason to suppose that either they or the pair in question had made a mistake; for nothing could have surpassed the presence of mind and the kindness of heart with which Sir Baldwin Gibson chatted to the woman whom he had tried for her life within the year. And his charity continued behind her back.

"Odd thing," said Sir Baldwin to his hostess, at the earliest opportunity, "but for the moment I could have sworn that woman was some one else. May I ask who she is exactly?"

"Sure, Sir Baldwin," replied Mrs. Uniacke, "and that's what I thought we were to hear at last. It's who she is we none of us know. And what does it matter? She's pretty and nice, and I'm just in love with her; but then nobody knows any more about her husband, and so we talk."

A few more questions satisfied the judge that he could not possibly have been mistaken, and he hesitated a moment, for he was a pious man; but Rachel's face, combined with her nerve, had deepended an impression which was now nearly a year old, and the superfluous proximity of an angular and aquiline lady, to whom Sir Baldwin had not been introduced, but who was openly hanging upon his words, drove the good man's last scruple to the winds.

"Very deceptive, these likenesses," said he, raising his voice for the interloper's benefit; "in future I shall beware of them. I needn't tell you, Mrs. Uniacke, that I never before set eyes upon the lady whom I fear I embarrassed by behaving as though I had."

Rachel was not less fortunate in her companion of the moment which had so nearly witnessed her undoing. Ox-eyed Hugh Woodgate saw nothing inexplicable in Mrs. Steel's behavior upon her introduction to Sir Baldwin Gibson, and anything he did see he attributed to an inconvenient sense of that dignitary's greatness. He did not think the matter worth mentioning to his wife, when the Steels had dropped them at the Vicarage gate, after a pleasant but somewhat silent drive. Neither did Rachel see fit to speak of it to her husband. There was a certain unworthy satisfaction in her keeping something from him. But again she underrated his uncanny powers of observation, and yet again he turned the tables upon her by a sudden display of the very knowledge which she was painfully keeping to herself.

"Of course you recognized the judge?" said Steel, following his wife for once into her own apartments, where he immediately shut a door behind him and another in front of Rachel, who stood at bay before the glitter in his eyes.

"Of course," she admitted, with irritating nonchalance.

"And he you?"

"I thought he did at first; afterwards I was not so sure."

"But I am!" exclaimed Steel through his teeth.

Rachel's face was a mixture of surprise and incredulity.

"How can you know?" she asked coldly. "You were at least a hundred yards away at the time, for I saw you with Morna Woodgate."

"And do you think my sight is not good for a hundred yards," retorted Steel, "when you are at the end of them? I saw the whole thing—his confusion and yours—but then I did not know who he was. He must have been in the house when we arrived; otherwise I should have taken good care that you never met. I saw enough, however, to bring me up in time to see and hear more. I heard the way he was talking to you then; that was his damned good-nature, and he has us at his mercy all the same."

Rachel had never seen her husband in such a passion; indeed, she had never before known him in a state of mind to justify the use of such a word. He was paler than his wont, his eyes brighter, his lips more bloodless. Rachel experienced a strange sense of advantage, at once unprecedented and unforeseen, and with it an irresistible temptation to the sort of revenge which she knew to be petty at the time. But he had made her suffer; for once it was her turn. He could be cold as ice when she was not, could deny her his confidence when she all but fell upon her knees before him; he should learn what it was to be treated as he had treated her.

"I'm well aware of it," said Rachel, with a harsh, dry laugh, "though in point of fact I don't for a moment believe that he'll give me away. But really I don't think it matters if he does."

Steel stared; it was wonderful to her to see his face.

"It doesn't matter?" he repeated in angry astonishment.

"Not to me," rejoined Rachel, bitterly. "You tell me nothing. What can matter to me? When you can tell me why you felt compelled to marry me—when you have the courage to tell me that—other things may begin to matter again!"

Steel stared harder than before; he did not flinch, but his eyes seemed to hedge together as he stared, and the glittering light in them to concentrate in one baleful gleam. Yet it was not a cruel look; it was the look of a man who has sealed his lips upon one point for ever, and who views any questioning on that point as an attempt upon his treasury. There was more of self-defence than of actual hostility in the compressed lips, the bloodless face, the glaring eyes. Then, with a shrug, the look, the resentment, and the passion were shaken off, and Steel stepped briskly to the inner door, which he had shut in Rachel's path. Opening it, he bowed her through with a ceremony conspicuous even in their ceremonious relations.

But Rachel nursed her contrariety, even to the extent of a perverse satisfaction at her encounter with the judge, and a fierce enjoyment of its still possible consequences. The mood was neither logical nor generous, and yet it was human enough in the actual circumstances of the case. At last she had made him feel! It had taken her the better part of a year, but here at last was something that he really felt. And it had to do with her; it was impending disaster to herself which had brought about this change in her husband; she knew him too well not to acquit him of purely selfish solicitude for his own good name and comfortable status in a society for which he had no real regard. There was never a man less dependent upon the good opinion of other men. In absolute independence of character, as in sheer strength of personality, Steel stood by himself in the estimation of his wife. But he had deceived her unnecessarily for weeks and months. He had lied to her. He had refused her his whole confidence when she begged him for it, and when he knew how he could trust her. There was some deep mystery underlying their marriage, he could not deny it, yet he would not tell her what it was.

He had made her suffer needless pain; it was his turn. And yet, with all her resentment against him, and all her grim savoring of the scandal which he seemed to fear so much, there ran a golden thread of unacknowledged contentment in the conviction that those fears were all for her.

Outwardly she was callous to the last degree, reckless as on the day she made this marriage, and as light-hearted as it was possible to appear; but the excitement of the coming dinner-party was no small help to Rachel in the maintenance of this attitude. It was to be a very large dinner-party, and Rachel's first in her own house; in any case she must have been upon her mettle. Two dozen had accepted. The Upthorpe party was coming in force; if anybody knew anything, it would be Mrs. Venables. What would she do or say? Mrs. Venables was capable of doing or of saying anything. And what might not happen before the day was out?

It was a stimulating situation for one so curiously compact of courage and of nerves as the present mistress of Normanthorpe House; and for once she really was mistress, inspecting the silver with her own eyes, arranging the flowers with her own hands, and, what was more difficult, the order in which the people were to sit. She was thus engaged, in her own sanctum, when Mrs. Venables did the one thing which Rachel had not dreamt of her doing.

She called at three in the afternoon, and sent her name upstairs.

Rachel's heart made itself felt; but she was not afraid. Something was coming earlier than she had thought; she was chiefly curious to know what. Her first impulse was to have Mrs. Venables brought upstairs, and to invoke her aid in the arrangement of the table before that lady could open fire. Rachel disliked the great cold drawing-room, and felt that she must be at a disadvantage in any interview there. On the other hand, if this was a hostile visit, the visitor could not be treated with too much consideration. And so the servant was dismissed with word that her mistress would not be a moment; nor was Rachel very many. She glanced in a glass, but that was all; she might have been tidier, but not easily more animated, confident, and alert. She had reached the landing when she returned and collected all the cards which she had been trying to arrange; they made quite a pack; and Rachel laughed as she took them downstairs with her.

Mrs. Venables sat in solitary stiffness on the highest chair she had been able to find; neither Sybil nor Vera was in attendance; a tableful of light literature was at her elbow, but Mrs. Venables sat with folded hands.

"This is too good of you!" cried Rachel, greeting her in a manner redeemed from hypocrisy by a touch of irresistible irony. "You know my inexperience, and you have come to tell me things, have you not? You could not have come at a better time. How do you fit in twenty-six people at one table? I wanted to have two at each end, and it can't be done!"

Mrs. Venables suppressed a smile suggestive of some unconscious humor in these remarks, but sat more upright than ever in her chair, with a hard light in the bright brown eyes that stared serenely into Rachel's own.

"I cannot say I came to offer you my assistance, Mrs. Steel. I only take liberties with very intimate friends."

"Then I wonder what can have brought you!"

And Rachel returned both the smile and the stare with irritating self-control.

"I will tell you," said Mrs. Venables, weightily. "There is a certain thing being said of you, Mrs. Steel; and I wish to know from your own lips whether there is any truth in it or none."

Rachel held up her hands as quick as thought.

"My dear Mrs. Venables, you can't mean that you are bringing me a piece of unpleasant gossip on the very afternoon of my first dinner-party?"

"It remains with you," said Mrs. Venables, changing color at this hit, "to say whether it is mere gossip or not. You must know, Mrs. Steel, though we were all quite charmed with your husband from the moment he came among us, we none of us had the least idea where he came from nor have we yet."

"You are speaking for the neighborhood?" inquired Rachel, sweetly.

"I am," said Mrs. Venables.

"Town and county," murmured Rachel. "And you mean that nobody in the district knew anything at all about my husband?"

"Not a thing," said Mrs. Venables.

"And yet you called on him; and yet you took pity on him, poor lonely bachelor that he was!"

This shaft also left its momentary mark upon the visitor's complexion. "The same applies to you," she went on the more severely. "We had no idea who you were, either!"

"And now?" said Rachel, still mistress of the situation, for she knew so well what was coming.

"And now we hear, and I wish to know whether it is true or not. Were you, or were you not, the Mrs. Minchin who was tried last winter for her husband's murder?"

Rachel looked steadily into the hard brown eyes, until a certain hardness came into her own.

"I don't quite know what right you think you have to ask me such a question, Mrs. Venables. Is it the usual thing to question people who have made a second marriage—supposing I am one—about their first? I fancied myself that it was considered bad form; but then I am still very ignorant of the manners and customs in this part of the world. Since you ask it, however, you shall have your answer." And Rachel's voice rang out through the room, as she rose majestically from the chair which she had drawn opposite that of the visitor. "Yes, Mrs. Venables, I am that unhappy woman. And what then?"

"No wonder you were silent about yourself," said Mrs. Venables, in a vindictive murmur. "No wonder we never even heard—"

"And what then?" repeated Rachel, with a quiet and compelling scorn. "Does it put one outside the local pale to keep to oneself any painful incident in one's own career? Is an accusation down here the same thing as a conviction? Is there nothing to choose between 'guilty' and 'not guilty'?"

"You must be aware," proceeded Mrs. Venables, without taking any notice of these questions—"indeed, you cannot fail to be perfectly well aware—that a large proportion of the public was dissatisfied with the verdict in your case."

"Your husband, for one!" Rachel agreed, with a scornful laugh. "He would have come to see me hanged; he told me so at his own table."

"You never would have been at his table," retorted Mrs. Venables, with some effect, "if he or I had dreamt who you were; but now that we know, you may be quite sure that none of us will sit at yours."

And Mrs. Venables rose up in all her might and spite, her brown eyes flashing, her handsome head thrown back.

"Are you still speaking for the district?" inquired Rachel, conquering a recreant lip to put the question, and putting it with her finest scorn.

"I am speaking for Mr. Venables, my daughters, and myself," rejoined the lady with great dignity; "others will speak for themselves; and you will soon learn in what light you are regarded by ordinary people. It is a merciful chance that we have found you out—a merciful chance! That you should dare—you, about whom there are not two opinions among sensible people—that you should dare to come among us as you have done and to speak to me as you have spoken! But one thing is certain—it is for the last time."

With that Mrs. Venables sailed to the door by which she was to make her triumphant exit, but she stopped before reaching it. Steel stood before her on the threshold, and as he stood he closed the door behind him, and as he closed it he turned and took out the key. There was the other door that led through the conservatory into the garden. Without a word he crossed the room, shut that door also, locked it, and put the two keys in his pocket. Then at last he turned to the imprisoned lady.

"You are quite right, Mrs. Venables. It is the last conversation we are likely to have together. The greater the pity to cut it short!"

"Will you have the goodness to let me go?" the visitor demanded, white and trembling, but not yet unimpressive in her tremendous indignation.

"With the greatest alacrity," replied Steel, "when you have apologized to my wife."

Rachel stood by without a word.

"For what?" cried Mrs. Venables. "For telling her what the whole world thinks of her? Never; and you will unlock that door this instant, unless you wish my husband to—to—horsewhip you within an inch of your life!"

Steel merely smiled; he could well afford to do so, lithe and supple as he still was, with flabby Mr. Venables in his mind's eye.

"I might have known what to expect in this house," continued Mrs. Venables, in a voice hoarse with suppressed passion, "what unmanly and ungentlemanly behavior, what cowardly insults! I might have known!"

And she glanced from the windows to the bells.

"It is no use ringing," said Steel, with a shake of his snowy head, "or doing anything else of the sort. I am the only person on the premises who can let you out; your footman could not get in if he tried; but if you like I shall shout to him to try. As for insults, you have insulted my wife most cruelly and gratuitously, for I happen to have heard more than you evidently imagine. In fact, 'insult' is hardly the word for what even I have heard you say; let me warn you, madam, that you have sailed pretty close to the wind already in the way of indictable slander. You seem to forget that my wife was tried and acquitted by twelve of her fellow-countrymen. You will at least apologize for that forgetfulness before you leave this room."

"Never!"

Steel looked at his watch and sat down. "I begin to fear you are no judge of character, Mrs. Venables; otherwise you would have seen ere this which of us will have to give in sooner or later. I can only tell you which of us never will!"

And Rachel still stood by without a word.