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HIS was the first communication that had come from her aunt in Rachel's lifetime.

“I think your aunt has forgiven me, at last,” her father said as he passed the letter across the table.

Rachel looked first at the signature. It seemed strange to see her own name there. It was as if her individuality, her very identity, was impugned by the fact that there should be two Rachel Deanes. Moreover there was a likeness between her aunt's autograph and her own, a characteristic turn in the looping of the letters, a hint of the same decisiveness and precision. If Rachel had been educated fifty years earlier, she might have written her name in just that manner.

“You're very like her in some ways,” her father said, as she still stared at the signature.

Rachel's eyelids drooped and her expression indicated a faint, suppressed intolerance of her father's remark. He said the same things so often, and in so precisely the same tone, that she had formed a habit of automatically rejecting the truth of certain of his statements. He had always appeared to her as senile. He had been over fifty when she was born, and ever since she could remember she had doubted the correctness of his information. She was, she had often told herself, “a born sceptic; an ultra-modern.” She had a certain veneration for the more distant past, but none for her father's period. “Victorianism” was to her a term of abuse. She had long since condemned alike the ethic and the æsthetic of the nineteenth century as repre-