the second, Rachel had chanced to catch sight of the card
upon which his name had been inscribed. He was, it seemed, a Mr.
Langholm; and all at once Rachel leant back and looked at him. He was a
loose-limbed, round-shouldered man, with a fine open countenance, and a
great disorderly moustache; his hair might have been shorter, and his
dress-coat shone where it caught the light. Rachel put the screw upon
her courage.

"These cards," she said, with a glimpse of her own colonial self, "are
very handy when one hasn't been introduced. Your name is not very
common, is it?"

"Not very," he answered, "spelt like that."

"Yes it's spelt the same way as the Mr. Langholm who writes."

"It is."

"Then are you any relation?"

"I am the man himself," said Langholm, with quite a hearty laugh,
accompanied by a flush of pleasurable embarrassment. He was not a
particularly popular writer, and this did not happen to him every day.

"I hoped you were," said Rachel, as she helped herself to the first
_entree_.

"Then you haven't read my books," he chuckled, "and you never must."

"But I have," protested Rachel, quite flushed in her turn by the small
excitement. "I read heaps of them in Tauchnitz when we were abroad. But
I had no idea that I should ever meet you in the flesh!"

"Really?" he said. "Then that's funnier still; but I suppose Mr. Steel
didn't want to frighten you. We saw quite a lot of each other last year;
he wrote to me from Florence before you came over; and I should have
paid my respects long ago, but I have been up in town, and only just
come back."

The flush had died out of Rachel's face. Her husband told her
nothing--nothing! In her indignation she was tempted to say so to the
stranger; she had to think a moment what to say instead. A falsehood of
any sort was always a peculiar difficulty to Rachel, a constitutional
aversion, and it cost her an effort to remark at last that it was very
stupid of her, she had quite forgotten, but now she remembered--of
course! And with that she turned to her host, who was offering an
observation across his empty plate.

"Strange thing, Mrs. Steel, but you can't get the meat in the country
that you can in town. Those fillets, now--I wish you could taste 'em at
my club; but we give our chef a thousand a year, and he drives up every
day in his brougham."

The novels of Charles Langholm were chiefly remarkable for their
intricate plots, and for the hope of better things that b