Rachel felt as bitter as one only does against those who have inspired
some softer feeling; the poison of misplaced confidence rankled in her
blood. Her husband had told her much, but it was not enough for Rachel,
and the little he refused to tell eliminated all the rest from her
mind. There was no merit even in such frankness as he had shown, since
her own, accidental discoveries had forced some measure of honesty upon
him. He had admitted nothing which Rachel could not have deduced from
that which she had found out for herself. She felt as far as ever from
any satisfactory clew to his mysterious reasons for ever wishing to
marry her. There lay the kernel of the whole matter, there the problem
that she meant to solve. If her first husband was at the bottom of it,
no matter how indirectly, and if she had been married for the dead man's
sake, to give his widow a home, then Rachel felt that the last affront
had been put upon her, and she would leave this man as she had been
within an ace of leaving his friend. So ran the wild and unreasonable
tenor of her thoughts. He had not married her for her own sake; it was
not she herself who had appealed to him, after all.
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