“I should have thought all the more of you for being an Australian,” continued Rachel, vaguely touched at the change in him, “I who am proud of being one myself.  What harm could it have done, my knowing that?”

“You are not the only one from whom I have hidden it,” said Steel, still in a low and altered voice.

“Yet you brought home all those keepsakes of the bush?”

“But I thought better of them, and have never even unpacked them all, as you must have seen for yourself.”

“Yet your mysterious visitor of the other day—­”

“Another Australian, of course; indeed, another man who worked upon my own run.”

“And he knows why you don’t want it known over here?”

“He does,” said Steel, with grim brevity.

Rachel moved forward and pressed his hand impulsively.  To her surprise the pressure was returned.  That instant their hands fell apart.

“I beg your pardon in my turn,” she said.  “I can only promise you that I will never again reopen that wound—­whatever it may be—­and I won’t even try to guess.  I undertook not to try to probe your past, and I will keep my undertaking in the main; but where it impinges upon my own past I simply cannot!  You say you were my first husband’s close friend,” added Rachel, looking her second husband more squarely than ever in the eyes.  “Was that what brought you to my trial for his murder?”

He returned her look.

“It was.”

“Was that what made you wish to marry me yourself?”

No answer, but his assurance coming back, as he stood looking at her under beetling eyebrows, over black arms folded across a snowy shirt.  It was the wrong moment for the old Adam’s return, for Rachel had reached the point upon which she most passionately desired enlightenment.

“I want to know,” she cried, “and I insist on knowing, what first put it into your head or your heart to marry me—­all but convicted—­”

Steel held up his hand, glancing in apprehension towards the door.

“I have told you so often,” he said, “and your glass tells you whenever you look into it.  I sat within a few feet of you for the inside of a week!”

“But that is not true,” she told him quietly; “trust a woman to know, if it were.”

In the white glare of the electric light he seemed for once to change color slightly.

“If you will not accept my word,” he answered, “there is no more to be said.”

And he switched off a bunch of the lights that had beaten too fiercely upon him; but it only looked as if he was about to end the interview.

“You have admitted so many untruths in the last half hour,” pursued Rachel, in a thrilling voice, “that you ought not to be hurt if I suspect you of another.  Come!  Can you look me in the face and tell me that you married me for love?  No, you turn away—­because you cannot!  Then will you, in God’s name, tell me why you did marry me?”