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 throug