Mr. Venables, who of course did take her in, by no means belied her husband’s description of him; he was a rotund man with a high complexion, and his bulging eye was on the menu before his soft body had sunk into his chair.  His conversation proved limited, but strictly to the point; he told Rachel what to eat, and once or twice what to avoid; lavished impersonal praise upon one dish, impartial criticisms upon another, and only spoke between the courses.  It was a large dinner-party; twenty-two sat down.  Rachel was at last driven to glancing at the other twenty.

To the man on her left she had not been introduced, but he had offered one or two civil observations while Mr. Venables was better engaged; and, after the second, Rachel had chanced to catch sight of the card upon which his name had been inscribed.  He was, it seemed, a Mr. Langholm; and all at once Rachel leant back and looked at him.  He was a loose-limbed, round-shouldered man, with a fine open countenance, and a great disorderly moustache; his hair might have been shorter, and his dress-coat shone where it caught the light.  Rachel put the screw upon her courage.

“These cards,” she said, with a glimpse of her own colonial self, “are very handy when one hasn’t been introduced.  Your name is not very common, is it?”

“Not very,” he answered, “spelt like that.”

“Yes it’s spelt the same way as the Mr. Langholm who writes.”

“It is.”

“Then are you any relation?”

“I am the man himself,” said Langholm, with quite a hearty laugh, accompanied by a flush of pleasurable embarrassment.  He was not a particularly popular writer, and this did not happen to him every day.

“I hoped you were,” said Rachel, as she helped herself to the first entree.

“Then you haven’t read my books,” he chuckled, “and you never must.”

“But I have,” protested Rachel, quite flushed in her turn by the small excitement.  “I read heaps of them in Tauchnitz when we were abroad.  But I had no idea that I should ever meet you in the flesh!”

“Really?” he said.  “Then that’s funnier still; but I suppose Mr. Steel didn’t want to frighten you.  We saw quite a lot of each other last year; he wrote to me from Florence before you came over; and I should have paid my respects long ago, but I have been up in town, and only just come back.”

The flush had died out of Rachel’s face.  Her husband told her nothing—­nothing!  In her indignation she was tempted to say so to the stranger; she had to think a moment what to say instead.  A falsehood of any sort was always a peculiar difficulty to Rachel, a constitutional aversion, and it cost her an effort to remark at last that it was very stupid of her, she had quite forgotten, but now she remembered—­of course!  And with that she turned to her host, who was offering an observation across his empty plate.

“Strange thing, Mrs. Steel, but you can’t get the meat in the country that you can in town.  Those fillets, now—­I wish you could taste ’em at my club; but we give our chef a thousand a year, and he drives up every day in his brougham.”