Rachel had dropped the card into her lap; she was looking straight at Mr. John Buchanan Steel himself.

“You are very rich,” she said gravely.

“I am nothing of the kind,” he protested.  “The Duke is rich, if you like, but I had to scrape together to pay him what would replenish his racing-stud, or stand him in a new yacht.”

But Rachel was not deceived.

“I might have known you were very rich,” she murmured, as much to herself as to him; and there was a strange finality in her tone, as though all was over between them; a still more strange regret, involuntary, unconscious, and yet distinct.

“Granting your hypothesis, for the sake of argument,” he went on, with his simplest smile; “is it as difficult as ever for the poor rich man to get to heaven?”

Rachel spent some moments in serious thought.  He was wonderfully honest with her; of his central motive alone was she uncertain, unconvinced.  In all else she felt instinctively that he was telling her the truth, telling her even more than he need.  His generous candor was a challenge to her own.

“It may be very small of me,” she said at length, “but—­somehow—­if you had been comparatively poor—­I should have been less—­ashamed!”

And candor begot candor, as it generally will.

“Upon my word,” he cried, “you make me sigh for the suburbs and six hundred a year!  But you shall know the worst.  I meant you to know it when I came in; then I changed my mind; but in for a penny, in for the lot!”

He caught up the magazine which he had brought in with the sheaf of newspapers, and he handed it to Rachel, open at an article quite excellently illustrated for an English magazine.

“There,” he cried, “there’s a long screed about the wretched place, before it came into my hands.  But it’s no use pretending it isn’t quite the place it was.  I took over the whole thing—­every stick outside and in—­and I’ve put in new drainage and the electric light.”

His tone of regret was intentionally ludicrous.  Had Rachel been listening, she would once more have suspected a pose.  But already she was deep in the article in the two-year-old magazine, or rather in its not inartistic illustrations.

“The House from the Tennis Lawn,” “In the Kitchen Garden,” “The Drawing-room Door,” “A Drawing-room Chimney-piece,” “A Corner of the Chinese Room,” “A Portion of the Grand Staircase”—­of such were the titles underneath the process pictures.  And (in all but their production) each of these was more beautiful than the last.

“That,” observed Steel, “happens to be the very article from which I first got wind of the place, when I was looking about for one.  And now,” he added, “I suppose I have cut my own throat!  Like the devil, I have taken you up to a high place-”

It was no word from Rachel that cut him short, but his own taste, with which she at least had very little fault to find.  And Rachel was critical enough; but her experience was still unripe, and she liked his view of his possessions, without perceiving how it disarmed her own.