ltered voice.

"Yet you brought home all those keepsakes of the bush?"

"But I thought better of them, and have never even unpacked them all, as
you must have seen for yourself."

"Yet your mysterious visitor of the other day--"

"Another Australian, of course; indeed, another man who worked upon my
own run."

"And he knows why you don't want it known over here?"

"He does," said Steel, with grim brevity.

Rachel moved forward and pressed his hand impulsively. To her surprise
the pressure was returned. That instant their hands fell apart.

"I beg your pardon in my turn," she said. "I can only promise you that I
will never again reopen that wound--whatever it may be--and I won't even
try to guess. I undertook not to try to probe your past, and I will keep
my undertaking in the main; but where it impinges upon my own past I
simply cannot! You say you were my first husband's close friend," added
Rachel, looking her second husband more squarely than ever in the eyes.
"Was that what brought you to my trial for his murder?"

He returned her look.

"It was."

"Was that what made you wish to marry me yourself?"

No answer, but his assurance coming back, as he stood looking at her
under beetling eyebrows, over black arms folded across a snowy shirt. It
was the wrong moment for the old Adam's return, for Rachel had reached
the point upon which she most passionately desired enlightenment.

"I want to know," she cried, "and I insist on knowing, what first put it
into your head or your heart to marry me--all but convicted--"

Steel held up his hand, glancing in apprehension towards the door.

"I have told you so often," he said, "and your glass tells you whenever
you look into it. I sat within a few feet of you for the inside of a
week!"

"But that is not true," she told him quietly; "trust a woman to know, if
it were."

In the white glare of the electric light he seemed for once to change
color slightly.

"If you will not accept my word," he answered, "there is no more to be
said."

And he switched off a bunch of the lights that had beaten too fiercely
upon him; but it only looked as if he was about to end the interview.

"You have admitted so many untruths in the last half hour," pursued
Rachel, in a thrilling voice, "that you ought not to be hurt if I
suspect you of another. Come! Can you look me in the face and tell me
that you married me for love? No, you turn away--because you cannot!
Then will you, i