s see the abnormal terms on which they lived.

What, then, was the explanation--the history--the excuse? They were
supposed to have married on the Continent; that was one of the few
statements vouchsafed by Steel, and he happened to have made it in the
first instance to Langholm himself. Was there any truth in it? And did
Steel know the truth concerning his wife?

Your imaginative man is ever quick to form a theory based upon facts of
his own involuntary invention. Langholm formed numerous theories and
invented innumerable facts during the four-and-twenty hours of his
present separation from the heroine and the villain of these romances.
The likeliest of the lot was the idea that the pair had really met
abroad, at some out-of-the-way place, where Rachel had been in hiding
from the world, and that in her despair of receiving common justice from
her kind, she had accepted the rich man without telling him who she was.
His subsequent enlightenment was Langholm's explanation of Steel's
coldness towards his wife.

He wondered if it was the kind of coldness that would ever be removed;
if Steel believed her guilty, it never would. Langholm would not have
admitted it, was not even aware of it in his own introspective mind, but
he almost hoped that Steel was not thoroughly convinced of his wife's
innocence.

The night of the dinner-party was so fine and the roads so clean that
Langholm went off on his bicycle once more, making an incongruous figure
in his dress-suit, but pedalling sedately to keep cool. Fortune,
however, was against him, for they had begun clipping those northern
hedgerows, and an ominous bumping upon a perfectly flat road led to the
discovery of a puncture a long mile from Normanthorpe. Thence onward the
unhappy cyclist had to choose between running beside his machine and
riding on the rims, and between the two expedients arrived at last both
very hot and rather late. But he thought he must be very late; for he
neither met, followed, nor was followed by any vehicle whatsoever in the
drive; and the door did not open before Langholm rang, as it does when
they are still waiting for one. Then the house seemed strangely silent
when the door did open, and the footman wore a curious expression as he
ushered the late comer into an empty drawing-room. Langholm was now
almost convinced that he had made some absurd mistake, and the
impression was not removed by the entry of Steel with his napkin in one
hand.

"I've m