is vivid imagination had pictured the long table, laid for
six-and-twenty, with four persons huddled at one end; but the telegrams
had come in time to have the table reduced to its normal size, and
Langholm found a place set for him between Mrs. Woodgate and Mrs. Steel.
He was only embarrassed when Rachel rose and looked him in the eyes
before holding out her hand.

"Have you heard?" she asked him, in a voice as cold as her marble face,
but similarly redeemed and animated by its delicate and distant scorn.

"Yes," answered Langholm, sadly; "yes, I have heard."

"And yet--"

He interrupted her in another tone.

"I know what you are going to say! I give you warning, Mrs. Steel, I
won't listen to it. No 'and yets' for me; remember the belief I had,
long before I knew anything at all! It ought not to be a whit stronger
for what I guessed yesterday for myself, and what your husband has this
minute confirmed. Yet it is, if possible, ten thousand times stronger
and more sure!"

"I do remember," said Rachel, slowly; "and, in my turn, I believe what
you say."

But her face did not alter as she took his hand; her own was so cold
that he looked at her in alarm; and the whole woman seemed turned to
stone. Yet the dinner went on without further hitch; it might have been
the very smallest and homeliest affair, to which only these guests had
been invited. Indeed, the menu had been reduced, like the table, by the
unerring tact of Rachel's husband, so that there was no undue memorial
to the missing one-and-twenty, and the whole ordeal was curtailed.

There was, on the other hand, no blinking what had happened, no pretence
of ignoring the one subject which was in everybody's thoughts. Thus Mrs.
Woodgate exclaimed aloud, what she was thinking to herself, that she
would never speak to Mrs. Venables again in all her life, and her
husband told her across the table that she had better not. Rachel
thereupon put in her word, to the effect that the Woodgates would cut
themselves off from everybody if they made enemies of all who
disbelieved in her, and she could not allow them to do anything of the
kind. Steel, again, speculated upon the probable behavior of the
Uniackes and the Invernesses, neither of these distinguished families
having been invited to the dinner, for obvious reasons arising from
their still recent return to the country. There was no effort to ignore
the absorbing topic before the butler and his satellites, but the lin