“If it was not the judge,” said he, “who in the world is it who has sprung this mine, I saw them meet, and as a matter of fact I did guess the truth.  But I had special reasons.  I had thought, God forgive me, of making something out of your wife’s case, Steel, little dreaming it was hers, though I knew it had no ordinary fascination for her.  But no one else can have known that.”

“You talked it over with her, however?”

And Steel had both black eyes upon the novelist, who made his innocent admission with an embarrassment due entirely to their unnecessarily piercing scrutiny.

“You talked it over with her,” repeated Steel, this time in dry statement of fact, “at least on one occasion, in the presence of a lady who had a prior claim upon your conversation.  That lady was Mrs. Vinson, and it is she who ought to have a millstone hanged about her neck, and be cast into the sea.  Don’t look as though you deserved the same fate, Langholm!  It would have been better, perhaps, if you had paid more attention to Vinson’s wife and less to mine; but she is the last woman in the world to blame you—­naturally!  And now, if you are ready, we will join them, Woodgate.”

Sensitive as all his tribe, and himself both gentle by nature and considerate of others according to his lights, which thoughtlessness might turn down or passion blur, but which burned steadily and brightly in the main, Charles Langholm felt stung to the soul by the last few words, in which Hugh Woodgate noticed nothing amiss.  Steel’s tone was not openly insulting, but rather that of banter, misplaced perhaps, and in poor taste at such a time, yet ostensibly good-natured and innocent of ulterior meaning.  But Langholm was not deceived.  There was an ulterior meaning to him, and a very unpleasant one withal.  Yet he did not feel unjustifiably insulted; he looked within, and felt justly rebuked; not for anything he had said or done, but for what he found in his heart at that moment.  Langholm entered the drawing-room in profound depression, but his state of mind was no longer due to anything that had just been said.

The scene awaiting him was surely calculated to deepen that dejection.  Rachel had left the gentlemen with the proud mien and the unbroken spirit which she had maintained at table without trace of effort; they found her sobbing on Morna Woodgate’s shoulder, in distress so poignant and so pitiful that even Steel stopped short upon the threshold.  In an instant she was on her feet, the tears still thick in her noble eyes, but the spirit once more alight behind the tears.

“Don’t go!” she begged them, in a voice that pierced one heart at least.  “Stop and help me, for God’s sake!  I can’t bear it.  I am not strong enough.  I can only pretend to bear it, for an hour, before the servants.  Even that has almost maddened me, the effort, and the shame.”

“The shame is on others,” said Steel, gravely enough now, “and not on you.  And who are those others, I should like to know?  And what does it matter what they think or say?  A hole-and-corner district like this is not the world!”