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 the world, and the same thing would happen in any other part.  It would happen in London, and everywhere else as soon as I became known.  And henceforth I mean to be known!” cried Rachel, wilfully; “there shall be no more hiding who I was, or am; that is the way to make them think the worst when they find out.  But is it not disgraceful?  I was acquitted, and yet I am to be treated as though I had been merely pardoned.  Is that not a disgrace to common humanity?”

“Humanity is not so common as you imagine,” remarked Steel.

“It is un-Christian!” cried Hugh Woodgate, with many repetitions of the epithet.

Langholm said nothing.  His eyes never left Rachel’s face.  Neither did she meet them for an instant, nor had she a look for Hugh Woodgate or even for his wife.  It was to her husband that Rachel had spoken every word; it was nearest him she stood, in his face only that she gazed.

“Are you going to let the disgrace continue?” she asked him, fiercely.

His answer was natural enough.

“My dear Rachel, what can I do?  I never dreamt that it would come out here; it is by the merest fluke that it did.”

“But I want it to come out,” cried Rachel; “if you mean the fact of my trial and my acquittal.  It was a mistake ever to hide either for a moment.  Henceforth they shall be no secret.”

“Then we cannot prevent the world from thinking and saying what it likes, however uncharitable and unjust.  Do be reasonable, and listen to reason, though God knows you can be in no mood for such cold comfort!  But I have done my best; I will do my best again.  I will sell this place to-morrow.  We will go right away somewhere else.”

“And then the same thing will happen there!  Is that all you can suggest, you who married me after hearing with your own ears every scrap of evidence that they could bring against me?”

“Have you anything better to suggest yourself, Rachel?”

“I have,” she answered, looking him full and sternly in the face, in the now forgotten presence of their three guests.  “Find out who is guilty, if you really want people to believe that I am not!”

Steel did not start, though there came a day when one at least of the listening trio felt honestly persuaded that he had; as a matter of fact, his lips came more closely together, while his eyes searched those of his wife with a wider stare than was often seen in them, but for two or three seconds at most, before dropping in perplexity to the floor.

“How can I, Rachel?” her husband asked quietly, indeed gently, yet with little promise of acquiescence in his tone.  “I am not a detective, after all.”

But that was added for the sake of adding something, and was enough to prove Steel ill at ease, to the wife who knew him as no man ever had.