Steele's card.
"Is he there?" asked Rachel, hastily.
"No, madame, but one of the servants is waiting for an answer. I think
there is something written on the back, madame."
Rachel read the harmless request on the back of the card; nothing could
have been better calculated to turn away suspicion of one sort or
another, and there was obvious design in the absence of an envelope. But
Rachel was not yet in the secret, and she was determined not to wait an
hour longer than she need.
"What is the time, please?"
"I will see, madame."
The girl glided out and in.
"Well?"
"A quarter to ten, madame."
"Then order my breakfast for a quarter past, and let Mr. Steele be told
that I shall be delighted to see him at eleven o'clock."
CHAPTER VII
A MORNING CALL
"The way to conceal one's identity," observed Mrs. Steel, "is to assume
another as distinctive as one's own."
This oracular utterance was confidentially delivered from the leathern
chair at the writing-table, in an inner recess of Rachel's sumptuous
sitting-room. The chair had been wheeled aloof from the table, on which
were Steel's hat and gloves, and such a sheaf of book-stall literature
as suggested his immediate departure upon no short journey, unless,
indeed, the magazines and the Sunday newspapers turned out to be another
offering to Mrs.
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