Rachel first peeped, then stepped, into a secret chamber as disappointing at the first glance as such a place could possibly be.  It was deep in dust, and filled with packing-cases not half unpacked, a lumber-room and nothing more.  The door swung to with a click behind her as Rachel stood in the midst of this uninteresting litter, and instinctively she turned round.  That instant she stood rooted to the ground, her eyes staring, her chin fallen, a dreadful fear in every feature of her face.

It was not that her second husband had followed and discovered her; it was the face of her first husband that looked upon Rachel Steel, his bold eyes staring into hers, through the broken glass of a fly-blown picture-frame behind the door.

The portrait was not hanging from the wall, but resting against it on the floor.  It was a photographic enlargement in colors, and the tinted eyes looked up at Rachel with all the bold assurance that she remembered so keenly in the perished flesh.  She had not an instant’s doubt about those eyes; they spoke in a way that made her shiver; and yet the photograph was that of a much younger man than she had married.  It was Alexander Minchin with mutton-chop whiskers, his hair parted in the middle, and the kind of pin in the kind of tie which had been practically obsolete for years; it was none the less indubitably and indisputably Alexander Minchin.

And indeed that fact alone was enough to shake Rachel’s nerves; her discovery had all the shock of an unwelcome encounter with the living.  But it was the gradual appreciation of the true significance of her discovery that redoubled Rachel’s qualms even as she was beginning to get the better of them.  So they had been friends, her first husband and her second!  Rachel stooped and looked hard at the enlargement, and there sure enough was the photographer’s imprint.  Yes, they had been friends in Australia, that country which John Buchanan Steel elaborately and repeatedly pretended never to have visited in all his travels!

Rachel could have smiled as she drew herself up with this point settled in her mind for ever; why, the room reeked of Australia!  These cases had never been properly unpacked, they were overflowing with memorials of the life which she herself knew so well.  Here a sheaf of boomerangs were peeping out; there was an old gray wide-awake, with a blue-silk fly-veil coiled above the brim; that was an Australian saddle; and those glass cases contained samples of merino wool.  So it was in Australia as a squatter that Steel had made his fortune!  But why suppress a fact so free from all discredit?  These were just the relics of a bush life which a departing colonist might care to bring home with him to the old country.  Then why cast them into a secret lumber-room whose very existence was unknown to the old Australian’s Australian wife?

Rachel felt her brain reeling; and yet she was thankful for the light which had been vouchsafed to her at last.  It was but a lantern flash through the darkness, which seemed the more opaque for that one thin beam of light; but it was something, a beginning, a clew.  For the rest she was going straight to the man who had kept her so long in such unnecessary ignorance.