Then there had been the incentive of adventure, the fascination of that very mystery which was a mystery still.

And then--yes!--there had been the compelling will of a nature infinitely stronger than her own or any other that she had ever known.
Did she regret this second marriage, this second leap in the dark?
No, she could not honestly pretend that she did; yet it had its sufficiently sinister side, its occasional admixture of sheer horror.

But this was only when the mysteries which encompassed her happened to prey upon nerves unstrung by some outwardly exciting cause; it was then she would have given back all that he had ever given her to pierce the veil of her husband's past.

Here, however, the impulse was more subtle; it was not the mere consuming curiosity which one in Rachel's position was bound to feel; it was rather a longing to be convinced that that veil hid nothing which should make her shudder to live under the same roof with this man.
Of one thing she was quite confident; wherever her husband had spent or misspent his life (if any part of so successful a whole could really have been misspent), it was not in England.

He was un-English in a hundred superficial ways--in none that cut deep.