e, 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