rs of speeches the wide world
over.

"Could you really think," he added, with one of his rarest and most
winning smiles, "that I should be such a fool as to invite you to step
out of the frying-pan into the fire?"

Rachel felt for a moment that she would like to say it was exactly what
she had done; but even in that moment she perceived that such a
statement would have been very far from the truth. And her nature was
large enough to refrain from the momentary gratification of a bitter
repartee. But he was too clever for her; that she did feel, whatever
else he might be; and her only chance was to return to the plain
questions with which she had started, demanding answers as plain. Rachel
led up to them, however, with one or two of which she already knew the
answer, thus preparing for her spring in quite the Old Bailey manner,
which she had mastered subconsciously at her trial, and which for once
was to profit a prisoner at the bar.

"Yet you don't any longer deny that you have been to Australia?"

"It is useless. I lived there for years."

"And you admit that you knew Alexander quite well out there?"

"Most intimately, in the Riverina, some fifteen or twenty years ago; he
was on my station as almost everything a gentleman could be, up to
overseer; and by that time he was half a son to me, and half a younger
brother."

"But no relation, as a matter of fact?"

"None whatever, but my very familiar friend, as I have already told
you."

"Then why in the world," Rachel almost thundered, "could you not tell me
so in the beginning?"

"That is a question I have already answered."

"Then I have another. Why so often and so systematically pretend that
you never were in Australia at all?"

"That is a question which I implore you not to press!"

The two answers, so like each other in verbal form, were utterly
dissimilar in the manner of their utterance. Suddenly, and for the first
time in all her knowledge of him, his cynical aplomb had fallen from the
man like a garment. One moment he was brazening past deceit with a
smiling face; the next, he was in earnest, even he, and that mocking
voice vibrated with deep feeling.

"I should have thought all the more of you for being an Australian,"
continued Rachel, vaguely touched at the change in him, "I who am proud
of being one myself. What harm could it have done, my knowing that?"

"You are not the only one from whom I have hidden it," said Steel,
still in a low and a