ave a millstone hanged about her neck, and
be cast into the sea. Don't look as though you deserved the same fate,
Langholm! It would have been better, perhaps, if you had paid more
attention to Vinson's wife and less to mine; but she is the last woman
in the world to blame you--naturally! And now, if you are ready, we will
join them, Woodgate."

Sensitive as all his tribe, and himself both gentle by nature and
considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness
might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly
in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few
words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss. Steel's tone was
not openly insulting, but rather that of banter, misplaced perhaps, and
in poor taste at such a time, yet ostensibly good-natured and innocent
of ulterior meaning. But Langholm was not deceived. There was an
ulterior meaning to him, and a very unpleasant one withal. Yet he did
not feel unjustifiably insulted; he looked within, and felt justly
rebuked; not for anything he had said or done, but for what he found in
his heart at that moment. Langholm entered the drawing-room in profound
depression, but his state of mind was no longer due to anything that had
just been said.

The scene awaiting him was surely calculated to deepen that dejection.
Rachel had left the gentlemen with the proud mien and the unbroken
spirit which she had maintained at table without trace of effort; they
found her sobbing on Morna Woodgate's shoulder, in distress so poignant
and so pitiful that even Steel stopped short upon the threshold. In an
instant she was on her feet, the tears still thick in her noble eyes,
but the spirit once more alight behind the tears.

"Don't go!" she begged them, in a voice that pierced one heart at least.
"Stop and help me, for God's sake! I can't bear it. I am not strong
enough. I can only pretend to bear it, for an hour, before the servants.
Even that has almost maddened me, the effort, and the shame."

"The shame is on others," said Steel, gravely enough now, "and not on
you. And who are those others, I should like to know? And what does it
matter what they think or say? A hole-and-corner district like this is
not the world!"

Rachel shook her head sadly; her beautiful eyes were dry now, and only
the more lustrous for the tears that they had shed. Langholm saw nothing
else.

"But it is the world," she asserted. "It is part of t