On such a day there could be few more undesirable abodes than Normanthorpe House, with its marble floors, its high ceilings, and its general scheme of Italian coolness and discomfort.  It was a Tuesday, when Mr. Steel usually amused himself by going on ’Change in Northborough and lunching there at the Delverton Club.  Rachel was thus not only physically chilled and depressed, but thrown upon her own society at its worst; and she missed that of her husband more than she was aware.

Once she had been a bright and energetic person with plenty of resources within herself; now she had singularly few.  She was distraught and uneasy in her mind, could settle less and less to her singing or a book, and was the victim of an increasing restlessness of mind and limb.  Others did not see it; she had self-control; but repression was no cure.  And for all this there were reasons enough; but the fear of identification by the neighbors as the notorious Mrs. Minchin was no longer one of them.

No; it was her own life, root and branch, that had grown into the upas-tree which was poisoning existence for Rachel Steel.  She was being punished for her second marriage as she had been punished for her first, only more deservedly, and with more subtle stripes.  Each day brought a dozen tokens of the anomalous position which she had accepted in the madness of an hour of utter recklessness and desperation.  Rachel was not mistress in her own house, nor did she feel for a moment that it was her own house at all.  Everything was done for her; a skilled housekeeper settled the smallest details; and that these were perfect alike in arrangement and execution, that the said housekeeper was a woman of irreproachable tact and capability, and that she herself had never an excuse for concrete complaint, formed a growing though intangible grievance in Rachel’s mind.  She had not felt it at first.  She had changed in these summer months.  She wanted to be more like other wives.  There was Morna Woodgate, with the work cut out for every hour of her full and happy days; but Morna had not made an anomalous marriage, Morna had married for love.

And to-day there was not even Morna to come and see her, or for her to go and see, for Tuesday afternoon was not one of the few upon which the vicar’s wife had no settled duty or occupation in the parish.  Rachel so envied her the way in which she helped her husband in his work; she had tried to help also, in a desultory way; but it is one thing to do a thing because it is a duty, and another thing to do it for something to do, as Rachel soon found out.  Besides, Hugh Woodgate was not her husband.  Rachel had the right feeling to abandon those half-hearted attempts at personal recreation in the guise of good works, and the courage to give Morna her reasons; but she almost regretted it this afternoon.