CHAPTER XI

ANOTHER NEW FRIEND

The country folk did call upon the Steels, as indeed, they could scarcely fail to do, having called on him already as a bachelor the year before.  Nor were the Uniackes and the Invernesses the bell-wethers of the flock.  Those august families had returned to London for the season; but the taboo half-suggested by Mrs. Venables had begun and ended in her own mind.  Indeed, that potent and diplomatic dame, who was the undoubted leader of society within a four-mile radius of Northborough town hall, was the first to recognize the mistake that she had made, and to behave as though she had never made it.  Quite early in June, the Steels were bidden to a dinner-party in their honor at Upthorpe Hall.

“Mrs. Venables!” cried Rachel, in dismay.  “Is that the gushing woman with the quiet daughters who called last Thursday?”

“That is the lady,” said Steel, a gleam of humor in his grim eyes.  He never expressed an opinion to his wife about any one of their neighbors, but when she let fall an impression of her own, he would look at her in this way, as though it was the very one that he had formed for himself a year ago.

“But need we go?” asked Rachel, with open apprehension.

“I think so,” he said.  “Why not?”

“A dinner-party, of all things!  There is no cover at the dinner-table; you can’t even wear a hat; you must sit there in a glare for hours and hours!” And Rachel shuddered.  “Oh, don’t let us go!” she urged; but her tone was neither pathetic nor despairing; though free from the faintest accent of affection, it was, nevertheless, the tone of a woman who has not always been denied.

“I am afraid we must go,” he said firmly, but not unkindly.  “You see, it is in our honor—­as I happen to know; for Venables gave me a hint when I met him in the town the other day.  He will take you in himself.”

“And what is he like?”

“Fond of his dinner; he won’t worry you,” said Steel, reassuringly.  “Nor need you really bother your head about all that any more.  Nobody has recognized you yet; nobody is in the least likely to do so down here.  Don’t you see how delightfully provincial they are?  There’s a local lawyer, a pillar of all the virtues, who has misappropriated his own daughter-in-law’s marriage portion and fled the country with the principal boy in their last pantomime; there are a lot of smart young fellows who are making a sporting thousand every other day out of iron warrants; the district’s looking up after thirty years’ bad times; and this is the sort of thing it’s talking about.  These are its heroes and its villains.  All you hear from London is what the last man spent when he was up, and where he dined; and from all I can gather, the Tichborne trial made less impression down here than that of a Delverton parson who got into trouble about the same time.”