Over the house clambered a William Allen Richardson and two Gloires de Dijon, these last a-blowing, the first still resting from a profuse yield in June; in the southeast corner, a Crimson Rambler was at its ripe red height; and Caroline Testout, Margaret Dickson, La France, Madame Lambard, and Madame Cochet, blushed from pale pink to richest red, or remained coldly but beautifully white, at the foot of the Penzance briers.  Langholm had not known one rose from another when he came to live among this galaxy; now they were his separate, familiar, individual friends, each with its own character in his eyes, its own charm for him; and the man’s soul was the sweeter for each summer spent in their midst.  But to-night they called to closed nostrils and blind eyes.  And the evening sun, reddening the upper stems of the pines, and warming the mellow tiles of his dear cottage, had no more to say to Langholm’s spirit than his beloved roses.

The man had emerged from the dreamy, artistic, aesthetic existence into which he had drifted through living alone amid so much simple beauty; he was in real, human, haunting trouble, and the manlier man for it already.

Could he be mistaken after all?  No; the more he pondered, the more convinced he felt.  Everything pointed to the same conclusion, beginning with that first dinner-party at Upthorpe, and that first conversation of which he remembered every word.  Mrs. Steel was Mrs. Minchin—­the notorious Mrs. Minchin—­the Mrs. Minchin who had been tried for her husband’s murder, and acquitted to the horror of a righteous world.

And he had been going to write a book about her, and it was she herself who had given him the idea!

But was it?  There had been much light talk about Mrs. Steel’s novel, and the plot that Mrs. Steel had given Langholm, but that view of the matter had been more of a standing joke than an intellectual bond between them.  It was strange to think of it in the former light to-night.

Langholm recalled more than one conversation upon the same subject.  It had had a fascination for Rachel, which somehow he was sorry to remember now.  Then he recollected the one end to all these conversations, and his momentary regret was swept away by a rush of sympathy which it did him good to feel.  They had ended invariably in her obtaining from him, on one cunning pretext or another, a fresh assurance of his belief in Mrs. Minchin’s innocence.  Langholm radiated among his roses as his memory convinced him of this.  Rachel had not talked about her case and his plot for the morbid excitement of discussing herself with another, but for the solid and wholesome satisfaction of hearing yet again that the other disbelieved in her guilt.

And did he not?  Langholm stood still in the scented dusk as he asked his heart of hearts the point-blank question.  And it was a crisper step that he resumed, with a face more radiant than before.