"Have I denied that the portrait you saw is
indeed the portrait of Alexander Minchin? And yet how easy that would
have been! It was taken long before you knew him; he must have altered
considerably after that. Or I might have known him under another name.
But no, I tell you honestly that your first husband was a very dear
friend of mine, more years ago than I care to reckon. Did you hear me?"
he added, with one of his sudden changes of tone and manner. "A very
dear friend, I said, for that he undoubtedly was; but was I going to ask
you to marry a very dear friend of the man who deteriorated so terribly,
and who treated you so ill?"
Delivered in the most natural manner imaginable, with the quiet
confidence of which this man was full, and followed by a smile of
conscious yet not unkindly triumph, this argument, like most that fell
from his lips upon her ears, was invested with a value out of all
proportion to its real worth; and Steel clinched it with one of those
homely saws which are not disdained by makers of speeches the wide world
over.
"Could you really think," he added, with one of his rarest and most
winning smiles, "that I should be such a fool as to invite you to step
out of the frying-pan into the fire?"
Rachel felt for a moment that she would like to say it was exactly what
she had done; but even in that moment she perceived that such a
statement would have been very far from the truth.
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