But he was too clever for her; that she did feel, whatever else he might be; and her only chance was to return to the plain questions with which she had started, demanding answers as plain.

Rachel led up to them, however, with one or two of which she already knew the answer, thus preparing for her spring in quite the Old Bailey manner, which she had mastered subconsciously at her trial, and which for once was to profit a prisoner at the bar.
"Yet you don't any longer deny that you have been to Australia ?" "It is useless.

I lived there for years." "And you admit that you knew Alexander quite well out there ?" "Most intimately, in the Riverina, some fifteen or twenty years ago; he was on my station as almost everything a gentleman could be, up to overseer; and by that time he was half a son to me, and half a younger brother." "But no relation, as a matter of fact ?" "None whatever, but my very familiar friend, as I have already told you." "Then why in the world," Rachel almost thundered, "could you not tell me so in the beginning ?" "That is a question I have already answered." "Then I have another.

Why so often and so systematically pretend that you never were in Australia at all ?" "That is a question which I implore you not to press!" The two answers, so like each other in verbal form, were utterly dissimilar in the manner of their utterance.

Suddenly, and for the first time in all her knowledge of him, his cynical aplomb had fallen from the man like a garment.