“I?” said Rachel, astonished.  “I don’t go in for anything.  But what sort of thing do you mean?”

“There is Scarlett,” said Doll, with relief, who hated definitions, and felt the conversation was on the slippery verge of becoming deep.  “Do you know him?  Looks as if he’d seen a ghost, doesn’t he?”

Rachel’s interest, never a heavy sleeper, was instantly awakened as she saw Sybell piloting Hugh towards her.  She recognized him—­the man she had seen last night in the hansom and afterwards at the Newhavens.  A glance showed her that his trouble, whatever it might be, had pierced beyond the surface feelings of anger and impatience and had reached the quick of his heart.  The young man, pallid and heavy-eyed, bore himself well, and Rachel respected him for his quiet demeanor and a certain dignity, which, for the moment, obliterated the slight indecision of his face, and gave his mouth the firmness which it lacked.  It seemed to Rachel as if he had but now stood by a death-bed, and had brought with him into the crowded room the shadow of an inexorable fate.

The others only perceived that he had a headache.  Hugh did not deny it.  He complained of the great heat to Sybell, but not to Rachel.  Something in her clear eyes told him, as they told many others, that small lies and petty deceits might be laid aside with impunity in dealing with her.  He felt no surprise at seeing her, no return of the sudden violent emotion of the night before.  He had never spoken to her till this moment, but yet he felt that her eyes were old friends, tried to the uttermost and found faithful in some forgotten past.  Rachel’s eyes had a certain calm fixity in them that comes not of natural temperament, but of past conflict, long waged, and barely but irrevocably won.  A faint ray of comfort stole across the desolation of his mind as he looked at her.  He did not notice whether she was handsome or ugly, any more than we do when we look at the dear familiar faces which were with us in their childhood and ours, which have grown up beside us under the same roof, which have rejoiced with us and wept with us, and without which heaven itself could never be a home.

In a few minutes he was taking her in to dinner.  He had imagined that she was a woman of few words, but after a faint attempt at conversation he found that he had relapsed into silence, and that it was she who was talking.  Presently the heavy cloud upon his brain lifted.  His strained face relaxed.  She glanced at him, and continued her little monologue.  Her face had brightened.

He had dreaded this dinner-party, this first essay to preserve his balance in public with his frightful invisible burden; but he was getting through it better than he had expected.

“I have come back to what is called society,” Rachel was saying, “after nearly seven years of an exile something like Nebuchadnezzar’s, and there are two things which I find as difficult as Kipling’s ’silly sailors’ found their harps ‘which they twanged unhandily.’”