Certainly the master’s manner could not have been very different at the head of his table as originally laid.  It was not festive, it was neither unnaturally jocular nor showy in any way, but it was delightfully confident and serene.  And the mistress was as calm in her way, though for once hers was the colder way, and it was the opinion of the pantry that she felt more than she showed; without a doubt Mrs. Woodgate had more work to restrain, now her tears for Rachel, and now her consuming indignation with the absentees.

“Your wife feels it as much as mine,” said Steel to the vicar, when the gentlemen were alone at last; and one of them could have struck him for the speech, one who had insight and could feel himself.

“I wouldn’t go so far as that,” the good vicar rejoined.  “But Morna feels it dreadfully.  Dreadfully she feels it!”

“I almost wish we had kept the table as it was,” pursued Steel over his cigar, “and had one of those flash-light photographs taken, as they do at all the twopenny banquets nowadays.  All that was left of them—­left of six-and-twenty!”

His flippant tone made Langholm writhe, and drove him into the conversation to change its tenor.  He asked by whom the evil had come.  “Surely not the judge?”

“No,” said Steel, with emphasis.  “Not that I have it for a fact, but I would put a thousand pounds upon his charity and his discretion in such a matter.  A kinder and a sounder man does not exist, though I say it who never met him in my life.  But I heard every word of my wife’s trial, and I know the way the judge took the case.  There were a heap of women witnesses, and her counsel was inclined to bully them; it was delightful to see the fatherly consideration that they received as compensation from the bench.”

Langholm’s breath was taken away.  Here was an end to the likeliest theory that he had evolved that morning among his roses.  Steel had not married his wife in ignorance of her life’s tragedy; he had been present, and probably fallen in love with her, at her trial!  Then why did he never behave as though he were in love?  And why must he expatiate upon the judge’s kindness to the female witnesses, instead of on the grand result of the trial over which he had presided?  Did Steel himself entertain the faintest doubt about the innocence of his wife, whose trial he had heard, and whom he had married thereafter within a few months at the most?  Langholm’s brain buzzed, even while he listened to what Hugh Woodgate was saying.

“I am not surprised,” remarked the vicar.  “I remember once hearing that Sir Baldwin Gibson and Lord Edgeware were the two fairest judges on the bench; and why, do you suppose?  Because they are both old athletes and Old Blues, trained from small boys to give their opponents every possible chance!”

Steel nodded an understanding assent.  Langholm, however, who was better qualified to appreciate the vicar’s point, took no notice of it.