e stood rooted to the
ground, her eyes staring, her chin fallen, a dreadful fear in every
feature of her face.

It was not that her second husband had followed and discovered her; it
was the face of her first husband that looked upon Rachel Steel, his
bold eyes staring into hers, through the broken glass of a fly-blown
picture-frame behind the door.

The portrait was not hanging from the wall, but resting against it on
the floor. It was a photographic enlargement in colors, and the tinted
eyes looked up at Rachel with all the bold assurance that she remembered
so keenly in the perished flesh. She had not an instant's doubt about
those eyes; they spoke in a way that made her shiver; and yet the
photograph was that of a much younger man than she had married. It was
Alexander Minchin with mutton-chop whiskers, his hair parted in the
middle, and the kind of pin in the kind of tie which had been
practically obsolete for years; it was none the less indubitably and
indisputably Alexander Minchin.

And indeed that fact alone was enough to shake Rachel's nerves; her
discovery had all the shock of an unwelcome encounter with the living.
But it was the gradual appreciation of the true significance of her
discovery that redoubled Rachel's qualms even as she was beginning to
get the better of them. So they had been friends, her first husband and
her second! Rachel stooped and looked hard at the enlargement, and there
sure enough was the photographer's imprint. Yes, they had been friends
in Australia, that country which John Buchanan Steel elaborately and
repeatedly pretended never to have visited in all his travels!

Rachel could have smiled as she drew herself up with this point settled
in her mind for ever; why, the room reeked of Australia! These cases had
never been properly unpacked, they were overflowing with memorials of
the life which she herself knew so well. Here a sheaf of boomerangs were
peeping out; there was an old gray wide-awake, with a blue-silk fly-veil
coiled above the brim; that was an Australian saddle; and those glass
cases contained samples of merino wool. So it was in Australia as a
squatter that Steel had made his fortune! But why suppress a fact so
free from all discredit? These were just the relics of a bush life which
a departing colonist might care to bring home with him to the old
country. Then why cast them into a secret lumber-room whose very
existence was unknown to the old Australian's Australia