n God's name, tell me why you did marry me?"

And she followed him with clasped hands, her beautiful eyes filled with
tears, her white throat quivering with sobs, until suddenly he turned
upon her as though in self-defence.

"No, I will not!" he cried. "Since the answer I have given you, and the
obvious answer, is not good enough for you, the best thing you can do is
to find out for yourself."

A truculent look came into Rachel's eyes, as they rested upon the smooth
face so unusually agitated beneath the smooth silvery hair.

"I will!" she answered through her teeth. "I shall take you at your
word, and find out for myself I will!"

And she swept past him out of the room.

[Illustration: "I will!" she answered through her teeth--and she swept
past him out of the room.]

CHAPTER XV

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

There was now an open breach between the Steels, but no third person
would have discerned any difference in their relations. It was a mere
snapping of the threads across the chasm which had always separated
Rachel from her second husband. The chasm had been plain enough to those
who came much in contact with the pair, but the little threads of
sympathy were invisible to the naked eye of ordinary observation. There
was thus no outward change, for neither was there any outward rupture.
It takes two to quarrel, and Steel imperturbably refused to make one.
Rachel might be as trying as she pleased; no repulse depressed, no
caprice annoyed him; and this insensibility was not the least of Steel's
offences in the now jaundiced eyes of his wife.

Rachel felt as bitter as one only does against those who have inspired
some softer feeling; the poison of misplaced confidence rankled in her
blood. Her husband had told her much, but it was not enough for Rachel,
and the little he refused to tell eliminated all the rest from her
mind. There was no merit even in such frankness as he had shown, since
her own, accidental discoveries had forced some measure of honesty upon
him. He had admitted nothing which Rachel could not have deduced from
that which she had found out for herself. She felt as far as ever from
any satisfactory clew to his mysterious reasons for ever wishing to
marry her. There lay the kernel of the whole matter, there the problem
that she meant to solve. If her first husband was at the bottom of it,
no matter how indirectly, and if she had been married for the dead man's
sake, to give his widow a hom