Hugh towards her. She recognized him--the man she
had seen last night in the hansom and afterwards at the Newhavens. A
glance showed her that his trouble, whatever it might be, had pierced
beyond the surface feelings of anger and impatience and had reached the
quick of his heart. The young man, pallid and heavy-eyed, bore himself
well, and Rachel respected him for his quiet demeanor and a certain
dignity, which, for the moment, obliterated the slight indecision of his
face, and gave his mouth the firmness which it lacked. It seemed to
Rachel as if he had but now stood by a death-bed, and had brought with
him into the crowded room the shadow of an inexorable fate.

The others only perceived that he had a headache. Hugh did not deny it.
He complained of the great heat to Sybell, but not to Rachel. Something
in her clear eyes told him, as they told many others, that small lies
and petty deceits might be laid aside with impunity in dealing with her.
He felt no surprise at seeing her, no return of the sudden violent
emotion of the night before. He had never spoken to her till this
moment, but yet he felt that her eyes were old friends, tried to the
uttermost and found faithful in some forgotten past. Rachel's eyes had a
certain calm fixity in them that comes not of natural temperament, but
of past conflict, long waged, and barely but irrevocably won. A faint
ray of comfort stole across the desolation of his mind as he looked at
her. He did not notice whether she was handsome or ugly, any more than
we do when we look at the dear familiar faces which were with us in
their childhood and ours, which have grown up beside us under the same
roof, which have rejoiced with us and wept with us, and without which
heaven itself could never be a home.

In a few minutes he was taking her in to dinner. He had imagined that
she was a woman of few words, but after a faint attempt at conversation
he found that he had relapsed into silence, and that it was she who was
talking. Presently the heavy cloud upon his brain lifted. His strained
face relaxed. She glanced at him, and continued her little monologue.
Her face had brightened.

He had dreaded this dinner-party, this first essay to preserve his
balance in public with his frightful invisible burden; but he was
getting through it better than he had expected.

"I have come back to what is called society," Rachel was saying, "after
nearly seven years of an exile something like Nebuchadnezza