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 th