“Odd thing,” said Sir Baldwin to his hostess, at the earliest opportunity, “but for the moment I could have sworn that woman was some one else.  May I ask who she is exactly?”

“Sure, Sir Baldwin,” replied Mrs. Uniacke, “and that’s what I thought we were to hear at last.  It’s who she is we none of us know.  And what does it matter?  She’s pretty and nice, and I’m just in love with her; but then nobody knows any more about her husband, and so we talk.”

A few more questions satisfied the judge that he could not possibly have been mistaken, and he hesitated a moment, for he was a pious man; but Rachel’s face, combined with her nerve, had deepended an impression which was now nearly a year old, and the superfluous proximity of an angular and aquiline lady, to whom Sir Baldwin had not been introduced, but who was openly hanging upon his words, drove the good man’s last scruple to the winds.

“Very deceptive, these likenesses,” said he, raising his voice for the interloper’s benefit; “in future I shall beware of them.  I needn’t tell you, Mrs. Uniacke, that I never before set eyes upon the lady whom I fear I embarrassed by behaving as though I had.”

Rachel was not less fortunate in her companion of the moment which had so nearly witnessed her undoing.  Ox-eyed Hugh Woodgate saw nothing inexplicable in Mrs. Steel’s behavior upon her introduction to Sir Baldwin Gibson, and anything he did see he attributed to an inconvenient sense of that dignitary’s greatness.  He did not think the matter worth mentioning to his wife, when the Steels had dropped them at the Vicarage gate, after a pleasant but somewhat silent drive.  Neither did Rachel see fit to speak of it to her husband.  There was a certain unworthy satisfaction in her keeping something from him.  But again she underrated his uncanny powers of observation, and yet again he turned the tables upon her by a sudden display of the very knowledge which she was painfully keeping to herself.

“Of course you recognized the judge?” said Steel, following his wife for once into her own apartments, where he immediately shut a door behind him and another in front of Rachel, who stood at bay before the glitter in his eyes.

“Of course,” she admitted, with irritating nonchalance.

“And he you?”

“I thought he did at first; afterwards I was not so sure.”

“But I am!” exclaimed Steel through his teeth.

Rachel’s face was a mixture of surprise and incredulity.

“How can you know?” she asked coldly.  “You were at least a hundred yards away at the time, for I saw you with Morna Woodgate.”

“And do you think my sight is not good for a hundred yards,” retorted Steel, “when you are at the end of them?  I saw the whole thing—­his confusion and yours—­but then I did not know who he was.  He must have been in the house when we arrived; otherwise I should have taken good care that you never met.  I saw enough, however, to bring me up in time to see and hear more.  I heard the way he was talking to you then; that was his damned good-nature, and he has us at his mercy all the same.”