Langholm who writes."
"It is."
"Then are you any relation?"
"I am the man himself," said Langholm, with quite a hearty laugh,
accompanied by a flush of pleasurable embarrassment. He was not a
particularly popular writer, and this did not happen to him every day.
"I hoped you were," said Rachel, as she helped herself to the first
_entree_.
"Then you haven't read my books," he chuckled, "and you never must."
"But I have," protested Rachel, quite flushed in her turn by the small
excitement. "I read heaps of them in Tauchnitz when we were abroad. But
I had no idea that I should ever meet you in the flesh!"
"Really?" he said. "Then that's funnier still; but I suppose Mr. Steel
didn't want to frighten you. We saw quite a lot of each other last year;
he wrote to me from Florence before you came over; and I should have
paid my respects long ago, but I have been up in town, and only just
come back."
The flush had died out of Rachel's face. Her husband told her
nothing--nothing! In her indignation she was tempted to say so to the
stranger; she had to think a moment what to say instead. A falsehood of
any sort was always a peculiar difficulty to Rachel, a constitutional
aversion, and it cost her an effort to remark at last that it was very
stupid of her, she had quite forgotten, but now she remembered--of
course! And with that she turned to her host, who was offering an
observation across his empty plate.
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