And she followed him with clasped hands, her beautiful eyes filled with tears, her white throat quivering with sobs, until suddenly he turned upon her as though in self-defence.

“No, I will not!” he cried.  “Since the answer I have given you, and the obvious answer, is not good enough for you, the best thing you can do is to find out for yourself.”

A truculent look came into Rachel’s eyes, as they rested upon the smooth face so unusually agitated beneath the smooth silvery hair.

“I will!” she answered through her teeth.  “I shall take you at your word, and find out for myself I will!”

And she swept past him out of the room.

[Illustration:  “I will!” she answered through her teeth—­and she swept past him out of the room.]

CHAPTER XV

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

There was now an open breach between the Steels, but no third person would have discerned any difference in their relations.  It was a mere snapping of the threads across the chasm which had always separated Rachel from her second husband.  The chasm had been plain enough to those who came much in contact with the pair, but the little threads of sympathy were invisible to the naked eye of ordinary observation.  There was thus no outward change, for neither was there any outward rupture.  It takes two to quarrel, and Steel imperturbably refused to make one.  Rachel might be as trying as she pleased; no repulse depressed, no caprice annoyed him; and this insensibility was not the least of Steel’s offences in the now jaundiced eyes of his wife.

Rachel felt as bitter as one only does against those who have inspired some softer feeling; the poison of misplaced confidence rankled in her blood.  Her husband had told her much, but it was not enough for Rachel, and the little he refused to tell eliminated all the rest from her mind.  There was no merit even in such frankness as he had shown, since her own, accidental discoveries had forced some measure of honesty upon him.  He had admitted nothing which Rachel could not have deduced from that which she had found out for herself.  She felt as far as ever from any satisfactory clew to his mysterious reasons for ever wishing to marry her.  There lay the kernel of the whole matter, there the problem that she meant to solve.  If her first husband was at the bottom of it, no matter how indirectly, and if she had been married for the dead man’s sake, to give his widow a home, then Rachel felt that the last affront had been put upon her, and she would leave this man as she had been within an ace of leaving his friend.  So ran the wild and unreasonable tenor of her thoughts.  He had not married her for her own sake; it was not she herself who had appealed to him, after all.  Curiosity might consume her, and a sense of deepening mystery add terrors of its own, but the resentful feeling was stronger than either of these, and would have afforded as strange a revelation as any, had Rachel dared to look deeper into her own heart.