That was something like a summer, as the saying is, and for once they could say it even on the bleak northern spurs of the Delverton Hills.  There were days upon days when that minor chain looked blue and noble as the mountains of Alsace and hackneyed song, seen with an envious eye from the grimy outskirts of Northborough, and when from the hills themselves the only blot upon the fair English landscape was the pall of smoke that always overhung the town.  On such days Normanthorpe House justified its existence in the north of England instead of in southern Italy; the marble hall, so chill to the tread at the end of May, was the one really cool spot in the district by the beginning of July; and nowhere could a more delightful afternoon be spent by those who cared to avail themselves of a general invitation.

The Steels had not as yet committed themselves to formal hospitality of the somewhat showy character that obtained in the neighborhood, but they kept open house for all who liked to come, and whom they themselves liked well enough to ask in the first instance.  And here (as in some other matters) this curious pair discovered a reflex identity of taste, rare enough in the happiest of conventional couples, but a gratuitous irony in the makers of a merely nominal marriage.  Their mutual feelings towards each other were a quantity unknown to either; but about a third person they were equally outspoken and unanimous.  Thus they had fewer disagreements than many a loving couple, and perhaps more points of insignificant contact, while all the time there was not even the pretence of love between them.  Their lives made a chasm bridged by threads.

This was not seen by more than two of their acquaintance.  Morna Woodgate had both the observation and the opportunities to see a little how the land lay between them.  Charles Langholm had the experience and the imagination to guess a good deal.  But it was little enough that Morna saw, and Langholm’s guesses were as wide of the mark as only the guesses of an imaginative man can be.  As for all the rest—­honest Hugh Woodgate, the Venables girls, and their friends the young men in the various works, who saw the old-fashioned courtesy with which Steel always treated his wife, and the grace and charm of her consideration for him—­they were every one receiving a liberal object lesson in matrimony, as some of them even realized at the time.

“I wish I could learn to treat my wife as Steel does his,” sighed the good vicar, once when he had been inattentive at the table, and Morna had rebuked him in fun.  “That would be my ideal—­if I wasn’t too old to learn!”

“Then thank goodness you are,” rejoined his wife.  “Let me catch you dancing in front of me to open the doors, Hugh, and I shall keep my eye on you as I’ve never kept it yet!”

But Rachel herself did not dislike these little graces, partly because they were not put on to impress an audience, but were an incident of their private life as well; and partly because they stimulated a study to which she had only given herself since their return to England and their establishment at Normanthorpe House.  This was her study of the man who was still calmly studying her; she was returning the compliment at last.