h it all. But it has been mentioned that Rachel at one
time had a voice, of which high hopes had been formed by inexperienced
judges. It was only at Normanthorpe that her second husband became aware
of her possession, one afternoon when she fancied that she had the house
to herself. So two could play at the game of consistent concealment! He
could not complain; it was in the bond, and he never said a word. But he
stood outside the window till she was done, for Rachel saw him in a
mirror, and for many an afternoon to come he would hover outside the
same window at the same time.

Why had he married her? Did he care for her, or did he not? What could
be the object of that extraordinary step? Rachel was as far from hitting
upon a feasible solution of these mysteries as she was from penetrating
the deeper one of his own past life. Sometimes she put the like
questions to herself; but they were more easily answered. She had been
in desperate straits, in reckless despair; even if her second marriage
had turned out no better than her first, she could not have been worse
off than she was on the night of her acquittal; but she had been very
well off ever since. Then there had been the incentive of adventure, the
fascination of that very mystery which was a mystery still. And
then--yes!--there had been the compelling will of a nature infinitely
stronger than her own or any other that she had ever known.

Did she regret this second marriage, this second leap in the dark? No,
she could not honestly pretend that she did; yet it had its sufficiently
sinister side, its occasional admixture of sheer horror. But this was
only when the mysteries which encompassed her happened to prey upon
nerves unstrung by some outwardly exciting cause; it was then she would
have given back all that he had ever given her to pierce the veil of her
husband's past. Here, however, the impulse was more subtle; it was not
the mere consuming curiosity which one in Rachel's position was bound to
feel; it was rather a longing to be convinced that that veil hid nothing
which should make her shudder to live under the same roof with this man.

Of one thing she was quite confident; wherever her husband had spent or
misspent his life (if any part of so successful a whole could really
have been misspent), it was not in England. He was un-English in a
hundred superficial ways--in none that cut deep. With all his essential
cynicism, there was the breadth and tolerance of