“If you insist upon hearing all the little details to-night,” said Steele, with a good-humored shrug, “well, I suppose you must hear them; but I hope you will not insist.  I have had to make provisions which you may very possibly resent, but I thought it would be time enough for us to quarrel about them in the morning.  To-night you need rest and sustenance, but no excitement; of that God knows you have had enough!  No one will come near you but the maid of whom I spoke; no questions will be put to you; everything is arranged.  But to-morrow, if you feel equal to it, you shall hear all about me, and form your own cool judgment of my behavior towards you.  Meanwhile won’t you trust me—­implicitly—­until then?”

“I do,” said Rachel, “and I will—­until to-morrow.”

“Then there are one or two things that I can promise you,” said Steel, with the heartiness of a man who has gained his point.  “You will not be compromised in any sort or kind of way; your self-respect shall not suffer; nothing shall vex or trouble you, if I can help it, while you remain at this hotel.  And this I guarantee—­whether you like it or not—­unless you tell them, not a single soul in the place shall have the faintest inkling as to who you are.  Now, only keep your why and wherefore till to-morrow,” he concluded cheerily, “and I can promise you almost every satisfaction.  But here we are at the hotel.”

He thrust his umbrella outside, pointing to a portico and courtyard on the right; and in another moment Rachel was receiving the bows of powdered footmen in crimson plush, while Steel, hat in hand, his white hair gleaming in the electric light, led the way to the lift.

Rachel’s recollection of that night was ever afterwards disjointed and involved as that of any dream; but there were certain features that she never forgot.  There was the beautiful suite of rooms, filled with flowers that must have cost a small fortune at that time of year, and in one of them a table tastefully laid.  Rachel remembered the dazzle of silver and the glare of napery, the hot plates, the sparkling wine, the hot-house fruit, and the deep embarrassment of sitting down to all this in solitary state.  Mr. Steel had but peeped in to see that all was in accordance with his orders; thereafter not even a waiter was allowed to enter, but only Rachel’s attendant, to whose charge she had been committed; a gentle and assiduous creature, quiet of foot and quick of hand, who spoke seldom but in a soothing voice, and with the delicate and pretty accent of the French-Swiss.

Rachel used to wonder whether she had shocked this mannerly young woman by eating very ravenously; she remembered a nervous desire to be done with that solitary repast, and to get to bed.  Yet when she was there, in the sweetest and whitest of fine linen, with a hot bottle at her feet, and a fire burning so brightly in the room that the brass bedstead seemed here and there red-hot, then the sound sleep that she sorely needed seemed further off than ever, for always she dreamt she was in prison and condemned to die, till at length she feared to close her eyes.  But nothing had been forgotten; and Rachel’s last memory of that eventful day, and not less eventful night, was of a mild, foreign face bending over her with a medicine-glass and a gentle word.