What was the secret of this second marriage on the part of one who had been so recently and so miserably married?  Was it love?  Langholm would not admit it for a moment.  Steel did not love his wife, and there was certainly nothing to love in Steel.  Langholm had begun almost to hate him; he told himself it was because Steel did not even pretend to love his wife, but let strangers see the abnormal terms on which they lived.

What, then, was the explanation—­the history—­the excuse?  They were supposed to have married on the Continent; that was one of the few statements vouchsafed by Steel, and he happened to have made it in the first instance to Langholm himself.  Was there any truth in it?  And did Steel know the truth concerning his wife?

Your imaginative man is ever quick to form a theory based upon facts of his own involuntary invention.  Langholm formed numerous theories and invented innumerable facts during the four-and-twenty hours of his present separation from the heroine and the villain of these romances.  The likeliest of the lot was the idea that the pair had really met abroad, at some out-of-the-way place, where Rachel had been in hiding from the world, and that in her despair of receiving common justice from her kind, she had accepted the rich man without telling him who she was.  His subsequent enlightenment was Langholm’s explanation of Steel’s coldness towards his wife.

He wondered if it was the kind of coldness that would ever be removed; if Steel believed her guilty, it never would.  Langholm would not have admitted it, was not even aware of it in his own introspective mind, but he almost hoped that Steel was not thoroughly convinced of his wife’s innocence.

The night of the dinner-party was so fine and the roads so clean that Langholm went off on his bicycle once more, making an incongruous figure in his dress-suit, but pedalling sedately to keep cool.  Fortune, however, was against him, for they had begun clipping those northern hedgerows, and an ominous bumping upon a perfectly flat road led to the discovery of a puncture a long mile from Normanthorpe.  Thence onward the unhappy cyclist had to choose between running beside his machine and riding on the rims, and between the two expedients arrived at last both very hot and rather late.  But he thought he must be very late; for he neither met, followed, nor was followed by any vehicle whatsoever in the drive; and the door did not open before Langholm rang, as it does when they are still waiting for one.  Then the house seemed strangely silent when the door did open, and the footman wore a curious expression as he ushered the late comer into an empty drawing-room.  Langholm was now almost convinced that he had made some absurd mistake, and the impression was not removed by the entry of Steel with his napkin in one hand.

“I’ve mistaken the night!” exclaimed the perspiring author.

“Not a bit of it,” replied Steel; “only we thought you weren’t coming at all.”