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