It was not that her second husband had followed and discovered her; it
was the face of her first husband that looked upon Rachel Steel, his
bold eyes staring into hers, through the broken glass of a fly-blown
picture-frame behind the door.
The portrait was not hanging from the wall, but resting against it on
the floor. It was a photographic enlargement in colors, and the tinted
eyes looked up at Rachel with all the bold assurance that she remembered
so keenly in the perished flesh. She had not an instant's doubt about
those eyes; they spoke in a way that made her shiver; and yet the
photograph was that of a much younger man than she had married. It was
Alexander Minchin with mutton-chop whiskers, his hair parted in the
middle, and the kind of pin in the kind of tie which had been
practically obsolete for years; it was none the less indubitably and
indisputably Alexander Minchin.
And indeed that fact alone was enough to shake Rachel's nerves; her
discovery had all the shock of an unwelcome encounter with the living.
But it was the gradual appreciation of the true significance of her
discovery that redoubled Rachel's qualms even as she was beginning to
get the better of them.
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