Curiosity might
consume her, and a sense of deepening mystery add terrors of its own,
but the resentful feeling was stronger than either of these, and would
have afforded as strange a revelation as any, had Rachel dared to look
deeper into her own heart.
If, on the other hand, she had already some conception of the truth
about herself, it would scarcely lessen her bitterness against one who
inspired in her emotions at once so complex and so painful. Suffice it
that this bitterness was extreme in the days immediately following the
scene between Rachel and her husband in the drawing-room after dinner.
It was also unconcealed, and must have been the cause of many another
such scene but for the imperturable temper and the singularly ruly
tongue of John Buchanan Steel. And then, in those same days, there fell
the two social events to which the bidden guests had been looking
forward for some two or three weeks, and of which the whole neighborhood
was to talk for years.
On the tenth of August the Uniackes were giving a great garden party at
Hornby Manor, while the eleventh was the date of the first real
dinner-party for which the Steels had issued invitations to Normanthorpe
House.
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