Of one thing she was quite confident; wherever her husband had spent or misspent his life (if any part of so successful a whole could really have been misspent), it was not in England.  He was un-English in a hundred superficial ways—­in none that cut deep.  With all his essential cynicism, there was the breadth and tolerance of a travelled man.  Cosmopolitan on the other hand, he could not be called; he had proved himself too poor a linguist in every country that they had visited.  It was only now, in their home life, that Rachel received hints of the truth, and it filled her with vague alarms, for that seemed to her to be the last thing he need have kept to himself.

One day she saw him ride a fractious horse, not because he was fond of riding, but because nobody in the stables could cope with this animal.  Steel tamed it in ten minutes.  But a groom remarked upon the shortness of his stirrups, in Rachel’s hearing, and on the word a flash of memory lit up her brain.  All at once she remembered the incident of the gum-leaves, soon after their arrival; he had told Morna what they were, yet to his wife he had pretended not to know.  If he also was an Australian, why on earth should that fact, of all facts, be concealed from her?  Nor had it merely been concealed; it was a point upon which Rachel had been deliberately misled, and the only one she could recall.

She was still brooding over it when a fresh incident occurred, which served not only to confirm her suspicions in this regard, but to deepen and intensify the vague horror with which her husband’s presence sometimes inspired her.

Mr. Steel was an exceptionally early riser.  It was his boast that he never went to sleep a second time; and one of his nearest approaches to a confidence was the remark that he owed something to that habit.  Now Rachel, who was a bad sleeper, kept quite a different set of hours, and was seldom seen outside her own rooms before the forenoon.  One magnificent morning, however, she was tempted to dress and make the best of the day which she had watched breaking shade by shade.  The lawns were gray with dew; the birds were singing as they never sing twice in one summer’s day.  Rachel thought that for once she would like to be up and out before the sun was overpowering.  And she proceeded to fulfil her wish.

All had been familiar from the window; all was unfamiliar on the landing and the stairs.  No one had been down; the blinds were all drawn; a clock ticked like a sledge-hammer in the hall.  Rachel ran downstairs like a mouse, and almost into the arms of her husband, whom she met coming out of the dining-room with a loaded tray.  Another would have dropped it; with Steel there was not so much as a rattle of the things, but his color changed, and Rachel had not yet had such a look as he gave her with his pursed mouth and his flashing eyes.

“What does this mean?” he demanded, in the tone of distant thunder, with little less than lightning in his glance.