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The Heart of Rachael

by Kathleen Thompson Norris · English · Gutenberg #4915 · 747,875 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Heart of Rachael

Author: Kathleen Thompson Norris


        
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #4915]
                Most recently updated: May 21, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4915

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEART OF RACHAEL ***




Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.











THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS

THE HEART OF RACHAEL

VOLUME VI





TO MY TERESA



BOOK I

THE HEART OF RACHAEL



CHAPTER I


The day had opened so brightly, in such a welcome wave of April
sunshine, that by mid-afternoon there were two hundred players
scattered over the links of the Long Island Country Club at Belvedere
Bay; the men in thick plaid stockings and loose striped sweaters, the
women's scarlet coats and white skirts making splashes of vivid color
against the fresh green of grass and the thick powdering of dandelions.
It was Saturday, and a half-holiday; it was that one day of all the
year when the seasons change places, when winter is visibly worsted,
and summer, with warmth and relaxation, bathing and tennis and motor
trips in the moonlight, becomes again a reality.

There was a real warmth in the sunshine to-day, there was a fragrance
of lilac and early roses in the idle breezes. "Hot!" shouted the
players exultantly, as they passed each other in the green valleys and
over the sunny mounds. "You bet it's hot!" agreed stout and glowing
gentlemen, wiping wet foreheads before reaching for a particular club,
and panting as they gazed about at the unbroken turf, melting a few
miles away into the new green of maple and elm trees, and topped, where
the slope rose, by the white columns and brick walls of the clubhouse.

Motor cars swept incessantly back and forth on the smooth roadway; a
few riders, their horses wheeling and dancing, went down the bridle
path, and there was a sprinkling of young men and women and some
shouting and clapping on the tennis-courts. But golf was the order of
the day. At the first tee at least two scores of impatient players
waited their turn to drive off, and at the last green a group of twenty
or thirty men and women, mostly women, were interestedly watching the
putting.

Mrs. Archibald Buckney, a large, generously made woman of perhaps
fifty, who stood a little apart from the group, with two young women
and a mild-looking blond young man, suddenly interrupted a general
discussion of scores and play with a personality.

"Is Clarence Breckenridge playing to-day, I wonder? Anybody seen him?"

"Must be," said the more definite of the two rather indefinite girls,
with an assumption of bright interest. Leila Buckney, a few weeks ago,
had announced her engagement to the mild-looking blond young man,
Parker Hoyt, and she was just now attempting to hold him by a charm she
suspected she did not possess for him, and at the same time to give her
mother and sister the impression that Parker was so deeply in her toils
that she need make no further effort to enslave him.

She had really nothing in common with Parker; their conversation was
composed entirely of personalities about their various friends, and
Leila felt it a great burden, and dreaded the hours she must perforce
spend alone with her future husband. It would be much better when they
were married, of course, but they could not even begin to talk wedding
plans yet, because Parker lived in nervous terror of his aunt's
disapproval, and Mrs. Watts Frothingham was just now in Europe, and had
not yet seen fit to answer her nephew's dignified notification of his
new plans, or the dutiful and gracious note with which Miss Leila had
accompanied it.

The truth, though Leila did not know it, was that Mrs. Frothingham had
a pretty social secretary named Margaret Clay, a strange, attractive
little person, eighteen years old, whose mother had been the old lady's
companion for many years. And to Magsie, as they all called her, young
Mr. Hoyt had paid some decided attention not many months before. Mrs.
Frothingham had seen fit to disapprove these advances then, but she was
an extraordinarily erratic and cross-grained old lady, and her silence
now had forced her nephew uncomfortably to suspect that she might have
changed her mind.

"Darn it!" said the engaging youth to himself "It's none of her
business, anyway, what I do!" But it made him acutely uneasy none the
less. He was the possessor of a good income, as he stood there, this
mild little blond; it came to him steadily and regularly, with no
effort at all on his part, but, with his aunt's million--it must be at
least that--he felt that he would have been much happier. There it was,
safe in the family, and she was seventy-six, and without a direct heir.
It would be too bad to miss it now!

He thought of it a great deal, was thinking of it this moment, in fact,
and Leila suspected that he was. But Mrs. Buckney, aside from a
half-formed wish that young persons were more demonstrative in these
days, and that the wedding might be soon, had not a care in the world,
and, after a moment's unresponsive silence, returned blithely to her
query about Clarence Breckenridge.

"I haven't seen him," responded one of her daughters presently. "Funny,
too! Last year he didn't miss a day."

"Of course he'll get the cup as usual, this year," Mrs. Buckney said
brightly. "But I don't suppose young people with their heads full of
wedding plans will care much about the golf!" she added courageously.

To this Miss Leila answered only with a weary shrug.

"Been drinking lately," Mr. Hoyt volunteered.

"You say he has?" Mrs. Buckney took him up promptly. "Is that so? I
knew he did all the time, of course, but I hadn't heard lately. Well--!
Pretty hard on Mrs. Breckenridge, isn't it?"

"Pretty hard on his daughter," Miss Leila drawled. "He has all kinds of
money, hasn't he, Park?"

"Scads," said Mr. Hoyt succinctly. Conversation languished. Miss Leila
presently said decidedly that unless her mother stood still, the sun,
which was indeed sinking low in the western sky, got in everyone's
eyes. Miss Edith said that she was dying for tea; Mr. Hoyt's watch was
consulted. Four o'clock; it was a little too early for tea.

At about five o'clock the sunlight was softened by a steadily rising
bank of fog, which drifted in from the east; a mist almost like a light
rain beat upon the faces of the last golfers. There were no riders on
the bridle path now, and the long line of motor cars parked by the
clubhouse doors began to move and shift and lessen. People with dinner
engagements melted mysteriously away, lights bloomed suddenly in the
dining-room, shades were drawn and awnings furled.

But in the club's great central apartment--which was reception-room,
lounging-room, and tea-room, and which, opened to the immense porches,
was used for dances in summer, and closed and holly-trimmed, was the
scene of many a winter dance as well--a dozen good friends and
neighbors lingered for tea. The women, sunk in deep chairs about the
blazing logs in the immense fireplace, gossiped in low tones together,
punctuating their talk with an occasional burst of soft laughter. The
men watched teacups, adding an occasional comment to the talk, but
listening in silence for the most part, their amused eyes on the
women's interested faces.

Here was a representative group, ranging in age from old Peter Pomeroy,
who had been one of the club's founders twelve years ago, and at sixty
was one of its prominent members to-day, to lovely Vivian Sartoris, a
demure, baby-faced little blonde of eighteen, who might be confidently
expected to make a brilliant match in a year or two. Peter, slim, hard,
gray-haired and leaden-skinned, well-groomed and irreproachably
dressed, was discussing a cotillion with Mrs. Sartoris, a stout, florid
little woman who was only twice her daughter's age. Mrs. Sartoris
really did look young to be the mother of a popular debutante; she rode
and played golf and tennis as briskly as ever; it was her pose to bring
up the subject of age at all times, and to threaten Vivian with
terrible penalties if she dared marry before her mother was forty at
least.

Old Peter Pomeroy, who had a shrewd and disillusioned gray eye,
thought, as everyone else thought, that Mrs. Sartoris was an
empty-headed little fool, but he rarely talked to a woman who was
anything else, and no woman ever thought him anything but markedly
courteous and gallant. He was old now, rich, unmarried, quite alone in
the world. For forty years he had kept all the women of his
acquaintance speculating as to his plans; marriageable women
especially--perhaps fifty of them--had been able in all maidenliness to
indicate to him that they might easily be persuaded to share the
Pomeroy name and fortune. But Peter went on kissing their hands, and
thrilling them with an intimate casual word now and then, and did no
more.

Perhaps he smiled about it sometimes, in the privacy of his own
apartments--apartments which were variously located in a great city
hotel, an Adirondacks camp, a luxurious club, his own yacht, and the
beautiful home he had built for himself within a mile of the spot where
he was now having his tea. Sometimes it seemed amusing to him that so
many traps were laid for him. He could appraise women quickly, and now
and then he teased a woman of his acquaintance with a delightfully
worded description of his ideal of a wife. If the woman thereafter
carelessly indicated the possession of the desired qualities in
herself, Peter saw that, too, but she never knew it, and never saw him
laughing at her. She went on for a month or two dressing brilliantly
for his carefully chaperoned little dinners, listening absorbed to his
dissertations upon Japanese prints or draperies from Peshawar, until
Peter grew tired and drew off, when she must put a brave face upon it
and do her share to show that she realized that the little game was
over.

He had not been entirely without feminine companionship, however,
during the half-century of his life as a man. Everybody knew
something--and suspected a great deal more--of various friendships of
his. Even the girls knew that Peter Pomeroy was not over-cautious in
the management of his affairs, but they did not like him the less, nor
did their mothers find him less eligible, in a matrimonial sense.
Sometimes he met the older women's hints quite seriously, with brief
allusions to some "little girl" who was always as sweet and deserving
and virtuous as his own fatherly interference in her affairs was
disinterested and kind. "I did what I could for her--risking what might
or might not be said," Mr. Pomeroy might add, with a hero's modest
smile and shrug. And if nobody ever believed him, at least nobody ever
challenged him.

Vivian Sartoris, girlishly perched on the great square leather fender
that framed the fireplace, was merely a modern, a very modern, little
girl, demurely dressed in the smartest of white taffeta ruffles, with
her small feet in white silk stockings and shoes, a daring little
black-and-white hat mashed down upon her soft, loose hair, and, slung
about her shoulders, a woolly coat of clearest lemon yellow. Vivian
gave the impression of a soft little watchful cat, unfriendly, alert,
selfish. Her manner was studiedly rowdyish, her speech marred by slang;
she loved only a few persons in the world besides herself. One of these
few persons, however, was Clarence Breckenridge's daughter, Carol,
affectionately known to all these persons as "Billy," and it was in
Miss Breckenridge's defence that Vivian was speaking now. A general yet
desultory discussion of the three Breckenridges had been going on for
some moments. And some particular criticism of the man of the family
had pierced Miss Sartoris' habitual attitude of bored silence.

"That's all true about him," she said, idly spreading a sturdy little
hand to the blaze. "I have no use for Clarence Breckenridge, and I
think Mrs. Breckenridge is absolutely the most cold-blooded woman I
ever met! She always makes me feel as if she were waiting to see me
make a fool of myself, so that she could smile that smooth superior
smile at me. But Carol's different--she's square, she is; she's just
top-hole--if you know what I mean--she's the finest ever," finished
Miss Sartoris, with a carefully calculated boyishness, "and what I mean
to say is, she's never had a fair deal!"

There was a little murmur of assent and admiration at this, and only
one voice disputed it.

"You're not called upon to defend Billy Breckenridge, Vivian," said
Elinor Vanderwall, in her cool, amused voice. "Nobody's blaming Billy,
and Rachael Breckenridge can stand on her own feet. But what we're
saying is that Clarence, in spite of what they do to protect him, will
get himself dropped by decent people if he goes on as he IS going on!
He was tennis champion four or five years ago; he played against an
Englishman named Waters, who was about half his age; it was the most
remarkable thing I ever saw--"

"Wonderful match!" said Peter Pomeroy, as she paused.

"Wonderful--I should say so!" Miss Vanderwall sighed admiringly at the
memory. "Do you remember that one set went to nineteen--twenty-one?
Each man won on his own service--'most remarkable match I ever saw! But
Clarence Breckenridge couldn't hold a racket now, and his game of
bridge is getting to be absolutely rotten. Crime, I call it!"

Vivian Sartoris offered no further remark. Indeed she had drifted into
a low-toned conversation with a young man on the fender. Elinor
Vanderwall was neither pretty nor rich, and she was unmarried at
thirty-four, her social importance being further lessened by the fact
that she had five sisters, all unmarried, too, except Anna, the oldest,
whose son was in college. Anna was Mrs. Prince; her wedding was only a
long-ago memory now. Georgiana, who came next, was a calm, plain woman
of thirty-seven, interested in church work and organized charities.
Alice was musical and delicate. Elinor was worldly, decisive, the
social favorite among the sisters. Jeanette was boyish and brisk, a
splendid sportswoman, and Phyllis, at twenty-six, was still babyish and
appealing, tiny in build, and full of feminine charms.

All five were good dancers, good tennis and golf players, good
horsewomen, and good managers. All five dressed well, talked well, and
played excellent bridge. The fact of their not marrying was an eternal
mystery to their friends, to their wiry, nervous little father, and
their large, fat, serene mother; perhaps to themselves as well. They
met life, as they saw it, with great cleverness, making it a rule to do
little entertaining at home, where the preponderance of women was most
notable, and refusing to accept invitations except singly. The
Vanderwall girls were rarely seen together; each had her pose and kept
to it, each helped the others to maintain theirs in turn. Alice's
music, Georgiana's altruistic duties, these were matters of sacred
family tradition, and if outsiders sometimes speculated as to the
sisters' sincerity, at least no Vanderwall ever betrayed another. And
despite their obvious handicaps, the five girls were regarded as social
authorities, and their names were prominently displayed in newspaper
accounts of all smart affairs. While making a fine art of feminine
friendships, they yet diffused a general impression of being involved
in endless affairs of the heart. They were much in demand to fill in
bridge tables, to serve on club directorates, to amuse week-end
parties, to be present at house weddings, and to remain with the family
for the first blank day or two after the bride and groom were gone.

"Queer fellow, Breckenridge," said George Pomeroy, old Peter's nephew,
a red-faced, florid, simple man of forty.

"Well, he never should have married as he did, it's all in a mess," a
woman's voice said lazily. "Rachael's extraordinary of course--there's
no one quite like her. But she wasn't the woman for him. Clarence
wanted the little, clinging, adoring kind, who would put cracked ice on
his forehead, and wish those bad saloonkeepers would stop drugging her
dear big boy. Rachael looks right through him; she doesn't fight, she
doesn't care enough to fight. She's just supremely bored by his
weakness and stupidity. He isn't big enough for her, either in goodness
or badness. I never knew what she married him for, and I don't believe
anyone else ever did!"

"I did, for one," said Miss Vanderwall, flicking the ashes from her
cigarette with a well-groomed fingertip. "Clarence Breckenridge never
was in love but once in his life--no, I don't mean with Paula. I mean
with Billy." And as a general nodding of heads confirmed this theory,
the speaker went on decidedly: "Since that child was born she's been
all the world to him. When he and Paula were divorced--she was the
offender--he fretted himself sick for fear he'd done that precious
five-year-old an injury. She didn't get on with her grandmother, she
drove governesses insane, for two or three years there was simply no
end of trouble. Finally he took her abroad, for the excellent reason
that she wanted to go. In Paris they ran into Rachael Fairfax and her
mother--let's see, that was seven years ago. Rachael was only about
twenty-one or two then. But she'd been out since she was sixteen. She
had the bel air, she was beautiful--not as pretty as she is now,
perhaps--and of course her father was dead, and Rachael was absolutely
on the make. She took both Clarence and Billy in hand. I understand the
child was wearing jewelry and staying up until all hours every night.
Rachael mothered her, and of course the child came to admire her. The
funny thing is that Rachael and Billy hit it off very well to this day.

"She and Clarence were married quietly, and came home. And I don't
think it was weeks, it was DAYS--and not many days--later, that Rachael
realized what a fool she'd been. Clarence had eyes for no one but the
girl, and of course she was a fascinating little creature, and she's
more fascinating every year."

"She's not as attractive as Rachael at that," said Peter Pomeroy.

"I know, my dear Peter," Miss Vanderwall assented quickly. "But Billy's
impulsive, and affectionate, at least, and Rachael is neither. Anyway,
Billy's at the age now when she can't think of anything but herself.
Her frocks, her parties, her friends--that's all Clarence cares about!"

"Selfish ass!" said a man's voice in the firelight.

"I KNOW Clarence takes Carol and her friends off on week-end trips,"
some woman said, "and leaves Rachael at home. If Rachael wants the car,
she has to ask them their plans. If she accepts a dinner invitation,
why, Clarence may drop out the last moment because Carol's going to
dine alone at home and wants her Daddy."

"Rachael's terribly decent about it," said the deep voice of old Mrs.
Torrence, who was chaperoning a grandson, glad of any excuse to be at
the club. "Upon my word I wouldn't be! She will breakfast upstairs many
a morning because Clarence likes Carol to pour his coffee. And when
that feller comes home tipsy--"

"Five nights a week!" supplemented Peter Pomeroy.

"Five nights a week," the old lady agreed, nodding, "she makes him
comfortable, quiets the house, and telephones around generally that
Clarence has come home with a splitting headache, and they can't
come--to dinner, or cards, or whatever it may be. But of course I don't
claim that she loves him, nor pretends to. I can imagine the scornful
look with which she goes about it."

"Well, why does she stand it?" said Mrs. Barker Emory, a handsome but
somewhat hard-faced woman, with a manner curiously compounded of
eagerness and uncertainty.

"Y'know, that's what I've been wondering," an Englishman added
interestedly.

"Why, what else would she do?" Miss Vanderwall asked briskly.

"Rachael's a perfectly adorable and brilliant and delightful creature,"
summarized Peter Pomeroy, "but she's not got a penny nor a relative in
the world that I've ever heard of! She's got no grounds for divorcing
Clarence, and if she simply wanted to get out, why, now that she's
brought Billy up, introduced her generally, whipped the girl into some
sort of shape and got her the right sort of friends, I suppose she
might get out and welcome!"

"No, Billy honestly likes her," objected Vivian Sartoris.

"She doesn't care for her enough to see that there's fair play," Elinor
Vanderwall said quickly.

"Why doesn't she take a leaf from Paula's book," somebody suggested,
"and marry again? She could go out West and get a divorce on any
grounds she might choose to name."

"Well, Rachael's a cold woman, and a hard woman--in a way," Miss
Vanderwall said musingly, after a pause, when the troubles of the
Breckenridges kept the group silent for a moment. "But she's a good
sport. She gets a home, and clothes, and the club, and a car and all
the rest out of it, and she knows Billy and Clarence do need her, in a
way, to run things, and to keep up the social end. More than that,
Clarence can't keep up this pace long--he's going to pieces fast--and
Billy may marry any day--"

"I understand Joe Pickering's a little bit touched in that quarter,"
said Mrs. Torrence.

"Yes--well, Clarence will never stand for THAT," somebody said.

Little Miss Sartoris neglected the Torrence grandson long enough to say
decidedly:

"She wouldn't LOOK at Joe Pickering! Joe drinks, and Billy's had enough
of that with her father. Besides, he has no money of his own! He's
impossible!"

"Where's the mother all this time?" asked the Englishman. "I mean to
say, she's living, isn't she, and all that?"

"Very much alive," Miss Vanderwall said. "Married to an Italian
count--Countess Luca d' Asafo. His people have cut him off; they're
Catholics. She has two little girls; there's an uncle who's obliged to
leave property to a son, and it serves Paula quite right, I think.
Where they live, or what on, I haven't the remotest idea. I saw her in
a car on Fifth Avenue, not so long ago, with two heavy little
black-haired girls; she looked sixty."

"Her sister, you know, was thick with my niece, Barbara Olliphant,"
said Peter Pomeroy. "And funny thing!--when Barbara was married..."

It was a long story, and fortunately moved away from the previous
topic; so that when it was presently interrupted by the arrival of two
women, everybody in the group had cause to feel gratitude for a
merciful deliverance.

The two women were Rachael and Carol Breckenridge, who came in a little
breathless, the throbbing engine of their motor car still sounding
faintly from the direction of the club doorway. Carol, a slender,
black-eyed, dusky-skinned girl of seventeen, took her place beside Miss
Sartoris on the fender, granting a brief unsmiling nod to one or two
friends, and eying the group between the loose locks of her smoky,
cropped black hair with the inscrutable, almost brooding, expression
that was her favorite affectation. Her lithe, loosely built little body
was as flat as a boy's, she clasped her crossed knees with slender,
satin-smooth little brown hands, exposing by her attitude a frill of
embroidered petticoat, a transparent stretch of ash-gray silk stocking,
and smart ash-gray buckskin slippers with silver buckles.

She was an effective little figure in the mingled twilight and
firelight, but it was toward her beautiful stepmother that everybody
looked as Rachael Breckenridge seated herself on the arm of old Mrs.
Torrence's chair and sent a careless greeting about the circle.

"Hello, everybody!" she said, in a voice of extraordinary richness and
sweetness, "Peter, Dolly, Vivian--HELLO, Elinor! How do you do, Mrs.
Emory?" There was an aside when the newcomer said imperatively to a
club attendant, "We'll have some light here, please!" Then she resumed
easily: "I do beg your pardon, Mrs. Emory, I interrupted you--"

"I only said that you were a little late for tea," said Mrs. Emory,
sweetly, wishing with a sort of futile rage that she could learn to say
almost nothing when this other woman, with her insulting bright air of
making one feel inferior, was about. The Emorys had lived in Belvedere
Hills for two years, coming from Denver with much money and irrefutable
credentials. They had been members of the club perhaps half that time,
members in good standing. But Mrs. Emory would have paid a large sum to
have Rachael Breckenridge call her "Belle," and Rachael Breckenridge
knew it.

The lights, duly poured in a soft flood from all sides of the room,
revealed in Mrs. Breckenridge one of those beauties that an older
generation of diarists and letter writers frankly spelled with a
capital letter as distinguishing her charms from those of a thousand of
lesser degree. When such beauty is unaccompanied by intellect it is a
royal dower, and its possessor may serenely command half a century of
unquestioning adoration from the sons of men, and all the good things
of life as well.

But when there is a soul behind the matchless eyes, and a keen wit
animates the lovely mouth, and when the indication of the white
forehead is not belied, it is a nice question whether great beauty be a
gift of benign or malicious fairies. Not a woman in this room or in any
room she entered could look at Rachael Breckenridge without a pang; her
supremacy was beyond all argument or dispute. And yet there was neither
complacency nor content in the lovely face; it wore its usual
expression of arrogant amusement at a somewhat tiresome world.

Both in the instant impression it made, and under closest analysis,
Rachael Breckenridge's beauty stood all tests. Her colorless skin was
as pure as ivory, her dark-blue eyes, surrounded by that faint sooty
color that only Irish eyes know, were set far apart and evenly arched
by perfect brows. Her white forehead was low and broad, the lustreless
black hair was swept back from it with almost startling simplicity, the
line of her mouth was long, her lips a living red. Her figure, as she
sat balancing carelessly on a chair-arm, showed the exquisite curves of
a woman slow to develop, who is approaching the height of her beauty,
and from the tip of her white shoe to the poppies on her soft straw hat
there was that distinction in her clothing that betrayed her to be one
of the few who may be always individual yet always in the fashion. She
was a woman, quick, dynamic, impatient, who vitalized the very
atmosphere in which she moved, challenging life by endless tests and
measures, scornful of admiration, and ambitious, even in this
recognized ambition of finding herself beautiful, prominent, and a rich
man's wife, for something further and greater, she knew not what. She
was an important figure in this world of hers; her word was authority,
her decree law. Never was censure so quick as hers, never criticism so
biting, or satire so witty. No human emotion was too sacred to form a
target for her glancing arrows, nor was any affection deep enough to
arouse in her anything but doubt and scorn.

"I don't want any tea, thank you, Peter," she said now, in the
astonishingly rich voice that seemed to fill the words with new
meaning. "And I won't allow the Infant to have any--no, Billy, you
shall not. You've got a complexion, child; respect it. Besides, you've
just had some. Besides, we're here for only two seconds--it's six
o'clock. We're looking for Clarence--we seek a husband fond, a parent
dear--"

"Clarence hasn't showed up here at all to-day," said Peter Pomeroy,
stretching back comfortably in his chair, appreciative eyes upon
Clarence's wife. "Shame, too, for we had some good golf. Course is in
splendid condition. George beat me three up and two to play, but I
don't bear any malice. Here I am signing for his highball."

"Well, then, we'll go on home," Mrs. Breckenridge said, without,
however, changing her relaxed position. "Clarence is probably there;
we've been playing cards at the Parmalees', or at least I have. Billy
and Katrina were playing tennis with Kent and--who's the red-headed
child you were enslaving this afternoon, Bill?"

"Porter Pinckard," Miss Breckenridge answered, indifferently, before
entering into a confidential exchange of brevities with Miss Sartoris.

"I'll call him out, and run him through the liver," said Peter Pomeroy,
"the miserable catiff! I'll brook no rivals, Billy."

Billy merely smiled lazily at this; her eyes were far more eloquent
than her tongue, as she was well aware.

"Let her alone, Fascination Fledgerby!" said Mrs. Breckenridge briskly.
"Why can't we take you home with us, Elinor? We go your way."

"You may," said Miss Vanderwall, rising. "You're dining at the Chases',
aren't you, Billy? So am I. But I was going to change here. Where are
you dining, Rachael?"

"Change at my house," Mrs. Breckenridge suggested, or rather commanded.
"I'm dining in my room, I think. I'm all in." But the clear and candid
eyes deceived no one. Clarence was misbehaving again, everybody
decided, and poor Rachael could not bespeak five minutes of her own
time until this particular period of intemperance was over. Miss
Vanderwall, settling herself in the beautiful Breckenridge car five
minutes later, faced the situation boldly.

"Where's Clarence, Rachael?"

"I haven't the remotest idea, my dear woman," said Mrs. Breckenridge
frankly, yet with a warning glance at the back of her stepdaughter's
head. Billy was at the wheel. "He didn't dine at home last night--"

"But we knew where he was," Billy said quickly, half turning.

"We knew where he was," agreed the older woman. "Watch where you're
going, Bill! He told Alfred that he was dining in town, with a friend,
talking business."

"I thought it was the night of Berry Stokes' dinner," suggested Miss
Vanderwall.

"He wasn't there--I asked him not to go," said Billy.

"Oh--" Miss Vanderwall began and then abruptly stopped. "Oh!" said she
mildly, in polite acquiescence.

They were sweeping through the April roadsides so swiftly that it was
only a moment later when Rachael, reaching for the door, remarked
cheerfully, "Here we are!"

The car had entered a white stone gateway, and was approaching a
certain charming country mansion, one that was not conspicuous among a
thousand others strewn over the neighboring hills and valleys, but a
beautiful home nevertheless. Vines climbed the brick chimneys, and
budding hydrangeas, in pots, topped the white balustrades of the porch.
A hundred little details of perfect furnishing would have been taken
for granted by the casual onlooker, yet without its lawns, its awnings,
its window boxes and snowy curtaining, its glimpse of screened veranda
and wicker chairs, its trim assembly of garage, stable, and servants'
cottages, its porte-cochere, sleeping porches, and tennis court, it
would have seemed incomplete and uncomfortable to its owners.

Rachael Breckenridge neither liked it nor disliked it. It had been her
home for the seven years of her married life, except for the month or
two she spent every winter in a New York hotel. She had never had any
great happiness in it, to be sure, but then her life had been
singularly lacking in moments of real happiness, and she had valued
other elements, and desired other elements more. She had not expected
to be happy in this house, she had expected to be rich and envied, and
secure, and she was all of these things. That they were not worth
attaining, no one knew better than Rachael now.

The house was of course a great care to her, the more so because Billy
was in it so little, and was so frankly eager for the time when she
should leave it and go to a house of her own, and because Clarence was
absolutely indifferent to it in his better moods, and pleased with
nothing when he was in the grip of his besetting sin. The Breckenridges
did little formal entertaining, but the man of the house liked to bring
men down from town for week-end visits, and Billy brought her young
friends in and out with youthful indifference to domestic regulations,
so that on Rachael, as housekeeper, there fell no light burden.

She carried it gracefully, knitting her handsome brows as the seasons
brought about their endless problems, discussing bulbs with old Rafael
in the garden when the snow melted, discussing paper and paint in the
first glory of May, superintending the making of iced drinks on the hot
summer afternoons, and in October filling her woodroom duly with the
great logs that would blaze neglected in the drawing-room fireplace all
winter long. The house was not large, as such houses go; too much room
was wasted by a very modern architect in linen closets and coat
closets, bathrooms and hall space, dressing-rooms, passages, and nooks
and corners generally. Yet Rachael's guest-rooms were models in their
way, and when she gave a luncheon the women who came were always ready
to exclaim in despairing admiration over the beauty of the gardens, the
flower-filled, airy rooms, the table appointments, and the hostess
herself.

But when they said that she was "wonderful"--and it was the inevitable
word for Rachael Breckenridge-the general meaning went deeper than
this. She was wonderful in her pride, the dignity and the silence of
her attitude toward her husband; she had been a wonderful mother to
Clarence's daughter; not a loving mother, perhaps--she was not loving
to anyone--but a miracle of determination and clearness of vision.

Who else, her friends wondered, could have cleared the social horizon
for Paula Breckenridge's daughter so effectively? With what brisk
resoluteness the new mother had cut short the aimless European
wanderings, cropped the child's artificially curled hair, given away
the unsuitable silk stockings and the ridiculous frocks and hats.
Billy, shorn and bewildered, had been brought home; had entered Miss
Proctor's select school, entered Miss Roger's select dancing class,
entered Professor Darling's expensive riding classes. Billy, in
dark-blue Peter Thompsons, in black stockings and laced boots, had been
dropped in among other little girls in Peter Thompsons and laced boots,
little girls with the approved names of Whittaker and Bowditch, Moran
and Merridew and Parmalee.

Billy had never doubted her stepmother's judgment; like all of the new
Mrs. Breckenridge's friends, she was deeply, dumbly impressed with that
lady's amazing efficiency. She had been a spoiled and discontented
little rowdy. She became an entirely self-satisfied little gentlewoman.
Clarence, jealously watching her progress, knew that Rachael was doing
for his daughter far more than he could ever do himself.

But Rachael, if she had expected reward, reaped none. Her husband was a
supremely selfish man, and his daughter inherited his sublime ability
to protect his own pleasure at any cost. Carol admired her step-mother,
but she was an indolent and luxury-loving little soul, and even as
early as her twelfth or fourteenth year she had been deeply flattered
by the evidences of her own power over her father. Into her youthful
training no reverence for parents--real or adopted--had been infused;
she called her father "Clancy," as some of his intimate friends called
him, and he delighted to take her orders and bow to her pretty tyranny.

Before she was sixteen he began to take her about with him: to dances,
to the theatre, and for long trips in his car. He entered eagerly into
her young friendships, frantic to prove himself as young at heart as
she. He paid her the extravagant compliments of a lover, and gave her
her grandmother's beautiful jewelry, as well as every trinket that
caught her eye.

And Billy accepted his attentions with a finished coquetry that was far
from childlike, a flush on her satin cheek, a dimple puckering the
corner of her mouth, and silky lashes lowered over her satisfied eyes.
She was inevitably precocious in many ways, but she was young enough
still to fancy herself one of the irresistible beauties and belles of
the world, and to flaunt a perfectly conscious arrogance in the eyes of
all other women.

All this was bewildering and painful to Rachael. She had never loved
her husband--love entered into none of her relationships--her marriage
had been only a step in the steady progress of her life toward the
position she desired in the world. But she had liked him. She had liked
his child, and she had come into the new arrangement kindly and
gallantly determined to make the venture at least as profitable to them
both as it was to her.

To be ignored, to be deliberately set aside, to be insulted by a
selfishness so calculating and so deliberate as to make her own
attitude seem all warmth and generosity by comparison, genuinely
astonished her. At first, indeed, a sort of magnificent impatience had
prevented her from feeling any stronger emotion than astonishment. It
was too ridiculous, said the bride to herself tolerantly; it could not
go on, of course, this preposterous consideration of a child of ten,
this belittling consideration of her own place in the scheme as less
Clarence's wife than Billy's mother. It must adjust itself with every
week that they three lived together, the child slipping back to her own
life, the husband and wife sharing theirs. When Clarence's first fears
for his daughter's comfort under the new rule were set at rest, when
his confidence in the wisdom and efficiency of his wife was fully
established, then a normal relationship must ensue. "Surely Clarence
wouldn't ask a woman to marry him just to give Billy a home and social
backing?" Rachael asked herself, in those first puzzled days in Paris.

That was seven years ago. She knew exactly that for truth now. Long ago
she had learned that whatever impulse had moved Clarence Breckenridge
to ask her to marry him was quickly displaced by his vision of Billy's
need as being greater than his own.

It had been an unpalatable revelation, for Rachael was a woman proud as
well as beautiful. But presently she had accepted the situation as it
stood, somehow fighting her way, as the years went by, to fresh
acceptances: the acceptance of Billy's ripening charms, the acceptance
of Clarence's more and more frequent times of inebriated
irresponsibility. Silently she made her mental adjustments, moving
through her gay and empty life in an unsuspected bitterness of
solitude, won to protest and rebellion only when the cold surface she
presented to the world was threatened from within or without.

It was distinctly threatened now, she realized with a little sick twist
of apprehension at heart, when her casual inquiry to a maid upon
entering was answered by a discreet, "Yes, Mrs. Breckenridge, Mr.
Breckenridge came home half an hour ago. Alfred is with him."

This was unexpected. Rachael did not glance either at her guest or her
stepdaughter, but she disposed of them both in a breath.

"Someone wants you on the telephone, Billy," she repeated after the
maid's information. "Take it in the library. Run right up to my room,
Elinor, and I'll be there in two minutes. I'll send some one in with
towels and brushes; you've time for a tub. Take these things, Helda,
and give them to Annie, and tell her to lookout for Miss Vanderwall."

The square entrance hall was sweet with flowers in the early spring
evening, Oriental rugs were spread on the dull mirror of the floor,
opened doors gave glimpses of airy colonial interiors, English chintzes
crowded with gay colored fruits and flowers, brick fireplaces framed in
classic white and showing a brave gleam of brass firedogs in the soft
lamplight. Not a book on the long tables, not an etching on the dull
rich paper of the walls, struck a false note. It was all exquisitely in
tone.

But Rachael Breckenridge, at best, saw less its positive perfections
than the tiniest opening through which an imperfection might push its
way, and in such an hour as this she saw it not at all. Her mouth a
trifle firm in its outline, her face a little pale, she went quickly up
the wide white stairway and along the open balcony above. There were
several doors on this balcony, which was indeed the upper hall. Mrs.
Breckenridge opened one of them without knocking, and closed it
noiselessly behind her.

The room into which she admitted herself presented exactly the picture
she had expected. The curtains, again of richly colored cretonne, were
drawn, a softly toned lamp on the reading table, and another beside the
bed, cast circles of pleasant light on the comfortable wicker chairs,
the cream-colored woodwork, and the scattered books and magazines.
Several photographs of Carol, beautifully framed, were on bookcase and
dresser, and a fine oil painting of the child at fourteen looked down
from the mantel. On the bed, a mahogany four-poster, with carved
pineapples finishing the posts, the frilled cretonne cover had been
flung back; Mr. Breckenridge had retired; his blond head was sunk in
the pillows; he clutched the blankets about him with his arms, his face
was not visible.

A quiet manservant, who was by turns butler, chauffeur, and valet, was
stepping softly about the room. Rachael interrogated him in a low tone:

"Asleep, Alfred?"

"Oh, no, ma'am!" the man said quickly. "He's been feeling ill. He says
he has a chill."

"When did he get home?" the wife asked.

"About half an hour ago, Mrs. Breckenridge. Mr. Butler telephoned me.
Some of the gentlemen were going on--to one of the beach hotels for
dinner, I believe, but Mr. Breckenridge felt himself too unwell to join
them, so I went for him with the little car, and Mr. Joe Butler and Mr.
Parks came home with him, Mrs. Breckenridge."

"Do you know if he went to bed last night at all?"

"No, ma'am, he said he did not. All the gentlemen looked as if
they--looked as if they might have--" Alfred hesitated delicately. "It
was Mr. Berry Stokes' bachelor dinner," he presently added.

At this moment there was a convulsion in the bed, and the red face of
Clarence Breckenridge revealed itself. The eyes were bloodstained, the
usually pale skin flushed and oily, the fair, thin hair tumbled across
a high and well-developed forehead. Rachael knew every movement of the
red and swollen lips, every tone of the querulous voice.

"Does Alfred have to stay up here doing a chambermaid's work?" demanded
the man of the house fretfully. "My God! Can you or can't you
manage--between your teas and card parties--to get someone else to put
this room in order?" He ended in a long moan, and dropped his head
again into the pillows.

"Do you know what he wants?" Rachael asked the man in a quick whisper.
"Go down and get it, then!"

"I'm co-o-old!" said the man in the bed, going into a sudden and
violent chill. "I've caught my death, I think. Joe made a punch--some
sort of an eggnog--eggs were bad, I think. I'm poisoned. The stuff was
rotten!" He sank mumbling back into the pillows.

Rachael, who had been hanging his coat carefully in the big closet
adjoining his room, came to the bedside and laid her cool fingers on
his burning forehead. If irrepressible distaste was visible in her
face, it was only a faint reflection of the burning resentment in her
heart.

"You've got a fever, Clarence," she announced quietly. The answer was
only a furious and incoherent burst of denunciation; the patient was in
utter physical discomfort, and could not choose his terms. Rachael--not
for the first nor the hundredth time--felt within her an impulse to
leave him here, leave him to outwear his miseries without her help. But
this she could not do without throwing the house into an uproar.
Clarence at these times had no consideration for public opinion, had no
dignity, no self-control. Much better satisfy him, as she had done so
many times before, and keep a brave face to the world.

So she placed a hot-water bag against his cold feet, went to her own
room adjoining to borrow a fluffy satin comforter with which to augment
his own bed covering, laid an icy towel upon his throbbing forehead,
and when Alfred presently appeared with a decanter of whisky, Rachael
watched her husband eagerly gulp down a glass of it without uttering
one word of the bitter protest that rose to her lips.

She was not a prude, with the sublime inconsistency of most women whose
lives are made the darker for drink; she did not identify herself with
any movement toward prohibition, or refuse the cocktails, the claret,
and the wine that were customarily served at her own and at other
people's dinner-tables. But she hated coarseness in any form, she hated
contact with the sodden, self-pitying, ugly animal that Clarence
Breckenridge became under the influence of drink.

To-night, when he presently fell asleep, somewhat more comfortable in
body, and soothed in spirit by the promise of a visit from the doctor,
Rachael went into her own room and sinking into a deep chair sat
staring stupidly at the floor. She did not think of the husband she had
just left, nor of the formal dinner party being given, only half a mile
away, to a great English novelist--a dinner to which the Breckenridges
had of course been asked and upon which Rachael had weeks ago set her
heart. She was tired, and her thoughts floated lazily about nothing at
all, or into some opaque region of their own knowing, where the ills of
the body might not follow.

Presently Miss Vanderwall, clothed in a trailing robe of soft Arabian
cotton, came briskly out of the bathroom, her short dark hair hanging
in a mane about her rosy face.

"Why so pensive, Rachael?" she asked cheerfully, pressing a button that
lighted the circle of globes about the dressing-table mirror, and
seating herself before it. But under her loose locks she sent a keen
and concerned look at her hostess' thoughtful face.

"Tired," Rachael answered briefly, not changing her attitude, but with
a fleeting shadow of a smile.

"How's Clancy?"

"Asleep. He's wretched, poor fellow! Berry Stokes' bachelor dinner, you
know. That crowd is bad for him."

"I KNEW it must have been an orgy!" Miss Vanderwall declared
vivaciously. "That was a silly slip of mine in the car. Billy doesn't
know he went, I suppose?"

"No, he promised her he wouldn't. But everyone was at the dinner. Some
of them came home early, I believe. But it was all kept quiet, because
Aline Pearsall is such a little shrinking violet, I suppose," Mrs.
Breckenridge said. "The Pearsalls are to think it was just an impromptu
affair. Billy and Aline of course have no idea what a party it was. But
Clarence says that poor Berry was worse than he, and a few of them are
still keeping it up. It's a shame, of course--"

Her uninterested voice dropped into silence.

"Men are queer," Miss Vanderwall said profoundly, busy with
ivory-backed brushes, powders, and pastes.

"The mystery to me--about men," mused Mrs. Breckenridge, her absent
eyes upon the buckled slipper she held in her hand, "is not that they
are as helpless as babies the moment anything goes wrong with their
poor little heads or their poor little tummies, but that they work so
hard, in spite of that, to increase the general discomfort of living.
Women have a great deal of misery to bear, they are brave or cowardly
about it as the case may be, but at least they endure and renounce and
diet and keep early hours--or whatever's to be done--they TRY to lessen
the sum of physical misery. But men go cheerily on--they smoke too
much, and eat too much, and drink too much, and they bring the
resulting misery sweetly and confidently to some woman to bear for
them. It's hopeless!"

"H'm!" was Miss Vanderwall's thoughtful comment. Presently she added
dubiously: "Did you ever think that another child might make a big
difference to Clarence, Rachael? That he might come to care for a son
as he does for Billy, don't you know--"

"Oh, I wasn't speaking of Clarence," Mrs. Breckenridge said coldly. And
Elinor, recognizing a false step, winced inwardly.

"No, I didn't suppose you were!" she assented hastily.

"If there's one thing I AM thankful for," Rachael presently said
moodily, "it's that I haven't a child. I'm rather fond of kiddies--nice
kiddies, myself; and Clarence likes children, too. But things are quite
bad enough now without that complication!" She brushed the loosened
hair from her face restlessly, and sighed. "Sometimes, when I see the
other girls," said she, "I think I'd make a rather good mother!
However"--and getting suddenly to her feet, she flung up her head as if
to be rid of the subject--"however, my dear, we shall never know! Don't
mind me to-night, Elinor, I'm in a horrible mood, it will take nothing
at all to set me off in what Bill used to call a regilyer tant'um!"

"Tantrum nothing," said Elinor, in eager sympathy, feeling with the
greatest relief that she was reinstated in Rachael's good graces after
her stupid blunder. "I don't see how you stand it at all!"

"It isn't the drinking and headaches and general stupidity in
themselves, you know," Rachael said, reverting to her original
argument, "but it's the atrocious UNNECESSITY of it! I don't mind
Clarence's doing as other men do, I certainly don't mind his caring so
much for his daughter"--her fine brows drew together--"but where do _I_
come in?" she demanded with a quizzical smile. "What's MY life? I ask
only decency and civility, and I don't get it. The very servants in
this house pity me--they see it all. When Clarence isn't himself, he
needs me; when he is, he is all for Billy. I must apologize for
breaking engagements; people don't ask us out any more, and no wonder!
I have to coax money out of him for bills; Billy has her own
check-book. I have to keep quiet when I'm boiling all over. I have to
defend myself when I know I'm bitterly, cruelly wronged!"

Neither woman had any scruples about the subject under discussion, but
even to Elinor Rachael had never spoken so freely before, and the
guest, desperately attempting to remember every word for the
delectation of her family and friends later on, felt herself at once
honored and thrilled.

"Rachael--but why do you stand it?"

Mrs. Breckenridge threw her a look full of all conscious forbearance.

"Well, what would YOU do?"

"Well. I'd"--Miss Vanderwall arrested the hand with which she was
carefully spreading her lips with red paste, to fling it, with a large
gesture, into the air--"I'd--why don't you GET OUT? Simply drop it
all?" she asked.

"For several reasons," the other woman returned promptly with a sort of
hard, bright pride. "One very excellent one is that I haven't one
penny. But I tell you, Elinor, if I knew how to put my hand on about a
thousand dollars a year--there are little towns in France, I have
friends in London--well"--and with a sudden straightening of her whole
body Rachael Breckenridge visibly rallied herself--"well, what's the
use of talking?" she said. But, as she rose abruptly, Elinor saw the
glint of tears on her lashes, and said to herself with a sort of
pleased terror that things between Clarence and Rachael must be getting
serious indeed.

She admired Mrs. Breckenridge deeply; more than that, the younger
woman's friendship and patronage were valuable assets to Miss
Vanderwall. But the social circle of Belvedere Hills was a small
circle, and Elinor had spent every one of her thirty-five summers, or a
part of every one, in just this limited group. There was little malice
in her pleasure at getting this glimpse behind the scenes in Rachael's
life; she would repeat her friend's confidence, later, with the calm of
a person doing the accepted and expected thing, with the complacence of
one who proves her right to other revelations from her listeners in
turn. It was by such proof judiciously displayed that Elinor held her
place in the front ranks of her own select little group of gossips and
intimates. She wished the Breckenridges no harm, but if there were dark
elements in their lives, Elinor enjoyed being the person to witness
them. Thoughtfully adding a bloom to her cheeks with her friend's
exquisite powder, Miss Vanderwall reflected sagely that, when one came
to think of it, it must really be rather rotten to be married to
Clarence Breckenridge.

Rachael presently came back, with the signs of her recent emotion
entirely effaced, and her wonderful skin glowing faintly from a bath.
Superbly independent of cosmetics, independent even of her mirror, she
massed the thick short lengths of dark hair on the top of her head,
thrust a jewelled pin through the coil, and began to hook herself into
a lacy black evening gown that was loose and comfortable. Before this
was finished her stepdaughter rapped on the door, and being invited,
came in with the full self-consciousness of seventeen.

"All hooked up straight?" asked Rachael. "That gown looks rather well."

"Do you good women realize what time it is?" Miss Breckenridge asked,
by way of reply.

"Has she got it a shade too short?" speculated Rachael, thoughtful eyes
on the girl's dress.

"Well--I was wondering!" Carol said eagerly, flinging down her wrap, to
turn and twist before a door that was a solid panel of mirror. "What do
you think--we'll dance."

"Oh, not a bit," Rachael presently decided. "They're all up to the
knees this year, anyway. Car come round?"

"Long ago," said Billy, and Elinor, reaching for her own wrap, declared
herself ready. "I wish you were going, Rachael," the girl added as she
turned to follow their guest from the room.

"Come back here a moment, Bill," Mrs. Breckenridge said casually,
seating herself at the dressing-table without a glance at her
stepdaughter. For a moment Miss Breckenridge stood irresolute in the
doorway, then she reluctantly came in.

"You're just seventeen, Billy," said the older woman indifferently.
"When you're eighteen, next March, I suppose you may do as you please.
But until then--either see a little less of Joe Pickering, or else come
right out in the open about it, and tell your father you want to see
him here. This silly business of telephoning and writing and meeting
him, here, there, and everywhere, has got to stop."

Billy stared steadily at her stepmother, her breath coming quick and
high, her cheeks red.

"Who said I met him--places?" she said, in a seventeen-year-old-girl's
idea of a tragic tone. Mrs. Breckenridge's answer to this was a shrug,
a smile, and a motherly request not to be a fool.

There was silence for a moment. Then Billy said recklessly:

"I like him. And you can't make me deny it!"

"Like him if you want to," said Mrs. Breckenridge, "although what you
can see in a man twice your age--with his particular history--However,
it's your affair. But you'll have to tell your father."

Billy shut her lips mutinously, her cheeks still scarlet.

"I don't see why!" she burst forth proudly, at last.

To this Mrs. Breckenridge offered no argument. Carefully filing a
polished fingertip she said quietly:

"I didn't suppose you would."

"And I think that if you tell him YOU interfere in a matter that
doesn't in the LEAST concern you," Billy pursued hotly, uncomfortably
eager to strike an answering spark, and reduce the conversation to a
state where mutual concessions might be in order. "You have no BUSINESS
to!"

Her stepmother was silent. She put on a ring, regarded it thoughtfully
on her spread fingers, and took it off again.

"In the first place," Billy said sullenly, "you'll tell him a lot of
things that aren't so!"

Silence. Outside the motor horn sounded impatiently. Billy suddenly
came close to her stepmother, her dark, mobile little face quite
transformed by anger.

"You can tell him what you please," she said in a cold fury, "but I'll
know WHY you did it--it's because you're jealous, and you want everyone
in the world to be in love with YOU! You hate me because my father
loves me, and you would do anything in the world to make trouble
between us! I've known it ever since I was a little girl, even if I
never have said it before! I--" She choked, and tears of youthful rage
came into her eyes.

"Don't be preposterous, Bill. You've said it before, every time you've
been angry, in the last five years," the older woman said coolly. "This
only means that you will feel that you have to wake me up, when you
come in to-night, to say that you are sorry."

"I will not!" said the girl at white heat.

"Well, I hope you won't," Rachael Breckenridge said amiably, "for if
there is one thing I loathe more than another, it is being waked up for
theatricals in the middle of the night. Good-bye. Be sure to thank Mrs.
Bowditch for chaperoning you."

"Are you going to speak to Clancy?" the girl demanded imperiously.

"Run along, Billy," Rachael said, with a faint show of impatience.
"Nobody could speak to your father about anything to-night, as you
ought to know."

For a moment Billy stood still, breathing hard and with tightly closed
lips, her angry eyes on her step-mother. Then her breast rose on a
childish, dry sob, she dropped her eyes, and moved a shining
slipper-toe upon the rug with the immortal motion of embarrassed youth.

"You--you used to like Joe, Rachael," she said, after a moment, in a
low tone.

"I don't dislike him now," Rachael said composedly.

"He's awfully kind--and--and good, and Lucy never understood him, or
tried to understand him!" said Billy in a burst. The other woman smiled.

"If Joe Pickering told you any sentimental nonsense like that, kindly
don't retail it to me," she said amusedly.

In a second Billy was roused to utter fury. Her cheeks blazed, her
breath came short and deep. "I hate you!" she said passionately, and
ran from the room.

Mrs. Breckenridge sat still for a few moments, but there was no emotion
but utter weariness visible in her face. After a while she said, "Oh,
Lord!" in a tone compounded of amusement and disgust, and rising, she
took a new book from the table, and went slowly downstairs.

In the lower hall Alfred met her, his fat young face duly mysterious
and important in expression.

"Mr. Breckenridge got a telephone message from Doctor Jordan, Mrs.
Breckenridge; the doctor's been called into town to a patient, so he
can't see Mr. Breckenridge to-night."

"Oh! Well, he'll probably be here in the morning," Rachael said
carelessly.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Breckenridge, but Mr. Breckenridge seemed to be a good
deal worried about himself, and he had me call Doctor Gregory," the man
pursued respectfully.

"Doctor GREGORY!" echoed his mistress, with a laugh like a wail.
"Alfred, what were you THINKING of! Why didn't you call me?"

"He wouldn't have me call you," Alfred said unhappily. "He spoke to the
doctor himself. We got the housekeeper first, and she said Doctor
Gregory was dressing. 'Tell him it's a matter of life and death,' says
Mr. Breckenridge. Then we got him. 'I'm dining out,' he says, 'but I'll
be there this evening.'"

"Oh, dear, dear, dear!" Mrs. Breckenridge said half to herself in
serio-comic desperation. "Gregory--called in for a--for a--for this! If
I could get hold of him! He didn't say where he was dining?"

"No, Mrs. Breckenridge," the man answered, with a great air of
efficiency.

"Well, Alfred, I wish sometimes you knew a little more--or a little
less!" Rachael said dispassionately. "Light a fire in the library, will
you? I'll have my dinner there. Tell Ellie to send me up something
broiled--nothing messy--and some strong coffee."




CHAPTER II


The coffee was strong. Mrs. Breckenridge found it soothing to rasped
nerves and tired body, and after the dinner things had been cleared
away she sat on beside the library fire, under the soft arc of light
from the library lamp, sipping the stimulating fluid, and staring at
the snapping and flashing logs.

A sense of merely physical well-being crept through her body, and for a
little time even her active brain was quieter; she forgot the man now
heavily sleeping upstairs, the pretty little tyrant who had rushed off
to dinner at the Chases', and the many perplexing elements in her own
immediate problem. She saw only the quiet changes in the fire as yellow
flame turned to blue--sank, rose, and sank again.

The house was still. Kitchenward, to be sure, there was a great deal of
cheerful laughter and chatter, as Ellie, sitting heavily ensconced in
the largest rocker, embroidered a centrepiece for her sister's
birthday, Annie read fortunes in the teacups, Alfred imitated the
supercilious manner of a lady who had called that afternoon upon Mrs.
Breckenridge, and Helda, a milk-blond Dane with pink-rimmed eyes,
laughed with infantile indiscrimination at everything, blushing an
agonized scarlet whenever Alfred's admiring eye met her own.

But the kitchen was not within hearing distance of the quiet room where
Rachael sat alone, and as the soft spring night wore on no sound came
to disturb her revery. It was not the first solitary evening she had
had of late, for Clarence had been more than usually reckless, and was
developing in his wife, although she did not realize it herself, a
habit of introspection quite foreign to her real nature.

She had never been a thoughtful woman, her days for many years had run
brilliantly on the surface of life, she knew not whence the current was
flowing, nor why, nor where it led her; she did not naturally analyze,
nor dispute events. Only a few years ago she would have said that to an
extraordinary degree fortune had been kind to her. She had been born
with an adventurous spirit, she had played her game well and boldly,
and, according to all the standards of her type, she had won. But
sitting before this quiet fire, perhaps it occurred to her to wonder
how it happened that there were no more hazards, no more cards left to
play. She was caught in a net of circumstances too tight for her
unravelling. Truly it might be cut, but when she stood in the loose
wreckage of it--how should she use her freedom? If it was a cage, at
least it was a comfortable cage; at least it was better than the
howling darkness of the unfamiliar desert beyond.

And yet she raged, and her hurt spirit flung itself again and again at
the bars. Young and beautiful and clever, how had life tricked her into
this deadlock, where had been the fault, and whose?

For some undefined reason Rachael rarely thought of the past. She did
not care to bring its certainties, its panorama of blinded eyes and
closed doors before her mental vision. But to-night she found herself
walking again in those old avenues; her thoughts went back to the
memories of her girlhood.

Girlhood? Her eyes smiled, but with the smile a little twinge of
bitterness drew down her mouth. What a discontented, eager, restless
girlhood it had been, after all. A girlhood eternally analyzing,
comparing, resenting, envying. How she had secretly despised the other
girls, typical of their class, the laughing, flirting, dress-possessed
girls of a small California town. How she had despised her aunts, all
comfortably married and prosperous, her aunts' husbands, her stodgy,
noisy cousins! And, for that matter, there had never been much
reverence in her regard for her mother, although Rachael loved that
complaining little woman in her cool way.

But for her father, the tall, clever, unhappy girl had a genuine
admiration. She did not love him, no one who knew Gerald Fairfax well
could possibly have sustained a deep affection for him, but she
believed him to be almost as remarkably educated and naturally gifted
as he believed himself to be. Her uncles were simply country merchants,
her mother's fat, cheerful father dealt in furniture, and,
incidentally, coffins, but her father was an Englishman, and naturally
held himself above the ordinary folk of Los Lobos.

Nobody knew much about him, when he first made his appearance in Los
Lobos, this silky-haired, round-faced, supercilious stranger, in his
smart, shabby Norfolk coat, which was perhaps one reason why every girl
in the village was at once willing to marry him, no questions asked.
His speech was almost a different tongue from theirs; he was
thirty-five, he had dogs and a man-servant, instead of the usual
equipment of mother, sisters, and "hired girl," and he seemed eternally
bored and ungracious. This was enough for the Los Lobos girls, and for
most of their mothers, too.

The newcomer bought a small ranch, three miles out of town, and lounged
about it in a highly edifying condition of elegant idleness. He rode a
good horse, drank a great deal, and strode out of the post-office once
a week scattering monogrammed envelopes carelessly behind him. He had
not been long in town before people began to say that his elder brother
was a lord; a duke, Mrs. Chess Baxter, the postmistress said, because
to her question regarding the rumor he had answered carelessly:
"Something of that sort."

Thirty years ago there were a great many detached Englishmen in
California, fourth and fifth sons, remittance men, family scapegraces
who had been banished to the farthest frontier by relatives who
regarded California as beyond the reach of gossip, and almost beyond
the reach of letters. Checks, small but regular, arrived quarterly for
these gentry, who had only to drink, sleep, play cards, and demoralize
the girls of the country. Here and there among them, to be sure, were
pink-skinned boys as fresh and sweet as the apple-blossoms under which
they rode their horses, but for the most part the emigrants were
dissipated, disenchanted, clinging loyally to the traditions of the
older country that had discarded them, and scorning the fragrant and
inexhaustible richness of the new land that had made them welcome. They
were, as a class, silent, only voluble on the subject of the despised
country of their adoption, and absolutely non-committal as to their own
histories. But far from questioning their credentials, the women and
girls everywhere accepted them eagerly, caught something of an English
accent and something of an English arrogance.

So Clara Mumford, a rose of a girl, cream-skinned, blue-eyed, and
innocent with the terrible innocence of the village girlhood that feels
itself so wise--Clara, who knew, because her two older sisters were
married, where babies come from, and knew, because of Alta Porter's
experience, that girls--nice girls, who went with one through the high
school--can yield to temptation and be ruined--Clara only felt, in
shyly announcing her engagement to Gerald Fairfax, that Fate had been
too kind.

That this glittering stranger twice her age--why, he was even a little
bald--a man who had travelled, who knew people of title, knew books,
and manners, and languages--that he should marry an undertaker's
daughter in Los Lobos! It was unbelievable. Clara's only misgiving
during her short engagement was that he would disappear like a dream.
She agreed with everything he said; even carrying her new allegiance to
the point of laughing a little at her own people: the layer cakes her
mother made for the Sunday noonday dinner; the red-handed, freckled
swain who called on her younger sister in the crisp, moonlighted winter
evenings; and the fact that her father shaved in the kitchen.

A few weeks slipped by, and Clara duly confided her youth and her
innocence and her roses to her English husband, a little ashamed of the
wedding presents her friends sent her, even a little doubtful of her
parents' handsome gift of a bird's-eye maple bedroom set and a parlor
set in upholstered cherry.

On her side she accepted everything unquestionably: the shabby little
ranch house that smelled of wood smoke, and tobacco smoke, and dogs;
the easy scorn of her old friends on her husband's part that so soon
alienated her from them; the drink that she quickly learned to regard
with uneasiness and distrust. It was not that Jerry ever got really
intoxicated, but he got ugly, excitable, irritable, even though quite
in control of his actions and his senses.

Clara was a good cook, although not as expert as her fond mother's
little substitutions and innocent manipulations during their engagement
had led Gerald to believe. But she loved to please him, and when
flushed and triumphant she put down some especially tempting dish
before him, and felt his arm about her, tears of actual joy would stand
in her bright eyes. They had some happy days, some happy hours, in the
first newness of being together.

Gerald's man, Thomas, was an early cause of annoyance to Clara. She
would not have objected to cooking for a farm "hand"; that was a matter
of course with all good farmers' wives. But Thomas was more British, in
all that makes the British objectionable, than his master, and Thomas
was quite decidedly addicted to drink. He never thought of wiping a
dish, or bringing Clara in a bucket of water from the well. He ate what
she set out upon the kitchen table for him, three times a day, chatting
pleasantly enough of the farm, the horses, chickens, and vegetable
garden, if Clara was in an amiable mood, but if, busy at the sink, or
clearing the dining-room table, she was inwardly fuming with resentment
at his very existence, Thomas could be silent, too, and would presently
saunter away, stuffing his pipe, without even the common courtesy of
piling his dishes together for her washing. Thomas held long
conversations with his master as they idled about the place; Clara
would hear their laughter. The manservant slept in a small shed
detached from the main house, and there were times when he did not
appear in the morning. At such times Gerald with a pot of strong coffee
likewise disappeared into the cabin.

"Pore old rotter!" the husband would say generously. "He's a decentish
sort, don't you know? I meanter say, poor old Thomas did me an awfully
good turn once--and that!"

Clara inferred from various hints that Gerald had once been in the
English army, and had met Thomas, and befriended him, or been
befriended by him, at that period of his existence. But, greatly to the
little bride's disappointment, Gerald never spoke of his old home or
his connections there. Clara had to draw what comfort she could from
his intimation that all his relatives were unbelievably eminent and
distinguished, the least of them superior in brain and achievement to
any American who ever drew the breath of life.

And presently she forgot Thomas, forgot the petty annoyance of cooking
and summer heat and dogs and physical discomfort, in the overwhelming
prayer that the coming child, about whose advent Gerald, at first
annoyed, had later been so generously good-natured, might prove a boy.
Gerald, living uncomplainingly in this dreadful little country town,
enduring Western conditions with such dignity, and loving his little
wife despite her undertaker father, would be seriously disgusted, she
knew, if she gave him a daughter.

"A--a girl?" Clara stammered, her wet eyes on the doctor's face, her
panting little figure lost in the big outline of her mother's
spare-room bed. She managed a brave smile, but there was a bitter lump
in her throat.

A girl!

And she had been so brave, so sweet with Jerry, who had not enjoyed the
three or four days of waiting at her mother's house; so strong in her
agonies, as became the healthy, normal little country girl she was!
Fate owed her a son, she had done her share, she had not flinched. And
now--a girl! Fresh tears of disappointment came to take the place of
tears of pain in her eyes. She remembered that Jerry had said, a few
days before, "It'll be a boy, of course--all the old women about seem
to have settled that--and I believe I'll cable Cousin Harold."

"Ma says it'll be a boy," Clara had submitted hopefully, longing to
hear more of "Cousin Harold," to whom Gerald alluded at long intervals.

"Of course it will--good old girl!" Jerry had agreed. And that was only
Thursday night, and this was in the late dawn of cold, wintry Saturday
morning.

Her mother bent over her and kissed her wet forehead. Mrs. Mumford's
big kind face was radiant; she had already four small grandsons; this
was the first grand-daughter. More than that, the nurse was not here
yet; she had been supreme through the ordeal; she had managed one more
birth extremely well, and she rejoiced in the making of a nation.

"Such a nice baby, darling!" she whispered, "with her dear little head
all covered with black hair! Neta's dressing her."

"Where's Gerald?" the young mother asked weakly.

"Right here! I'll let him in for a moment!" There was a satisfaction in
Mrs. Mumford's voice; everything was proceeding absolutely by schedule.
"And just as anxious to see you as you are to see him!" she added
happily. These occasions were always the same, and always far more
enjoyable to this practised parent than any pageant, any opera, any
social distinction could have been. To comfortably, soothingly lead the
trembling novice through the long experience, to whisk about the house
capably and briskly busy with the familiar paraphernalia, to cry in
sympathy with another's tears, to stand white-lipped, impotent,
anguished through a few dreadful moments, and then to laugh, and
rejoice, and reassure, before the happy hours of resting, and feeding,
and cuddling began--this was the greatest satisfaction in her life.

Clara, afraid in this first moment to face his disappointment, felt in
another the most delicious reassurance and comfort she had known in
months. Jerry, taking the chair by the bedside, was so dear about it!
The long night had much impressed the new-made father. They had had
coffee at about two o'clock--Clara remembered wondering how they could
sit enjoying it, instead of dashing the hideous cups to the floor, and
rushing out of the horrible enclosure of walls and curtains--and as he
bent over her she knew he had had something stronger since--but he was
so dear!

"Well, we've had a night of it, eh?" he said kindly. "Funny how much
one takes the little beggars for grawnted until it's one's own that
kicks up the row? You've not seen her--she's a nice little beggar. You
might get some sleep, I should think. I'm going to hang around until
some sort of a family jamboree is over, at one o'clock--your mother
insists that we have dinner--and then I'll go out to the rawnch. But
I'll be in in the morning!"

"Girl!" said Clara, apologetically, whimsically, deprecatingly, her
weak fingers clinging tightly to his.

"Ah, well, one carn't help that!" he answered philosophically. "We'll
have a row of jolly little chaps yet!"

But there was never another child. Clara, having cast her fortunes in
with her lord, was faithful to him through every breath she drew. But
before Rachael's first crying, feverish little summer was over there
had been some definite changes at the ranch. Thomas was gone, and
Clara, pale and exhausted with the heat, engaged Ella, a young woman
servant of her mother's selecting, to bake and wash and carry in
stove-wood. Clara managed them all, Gerald, the baby, and the maid.
Perhaps at first she was just a little astonished to find her husband
as easily managed as Ella and far more easily managed than Rachael.
Gerald Fairfax was surprised, too, lazily conceding his altered little
wife her new and energetic way with a mental reservation that when she
was strong and well again and the child less a care, things would be as
they were. But Clara, once in power, never weakened for a moment again.
Rachael grew up, a solitary and unfriendly, yet a tactful and
diplomatic, little person on the ranch. She early developed a great
admiration for her father, and a consequent regard for herself as
superior to her associates. She ruled her mother absolutely from her
fourth year, and remained her grandmother's great favorite among a
constantly increasing flock of grandchildren. Some innate pride and
scorn and dignity in the child won her her own way through school and
school days; her young cousins were bewildered themselves by the
respect and fealty they yielded her despite the contempt in which they
held her affectations.

Clara had never been a religious woman and, married to an utter
unbeliever, she had little enough to give a child of her own. But
Clara's mother was a church woman, and her father a deeply religious
man. It was his mother, "old lady Mumford"--Rachael's
great-grandmother--who taught the child her catechism whenever she
could get hold of that restless and lawless little girl.

Rachael had great fear and respect for her great-grandmother, and
everything that was fine and good in the child instinctively responded
to the atmosphere of her little home. It was an unpretentious home,
even for Los Lobos: only a whitewashed California cabin with a dooryard
full of wall flowers and geraniums, and pungent marigolds, and
marguerites that were budding, blossoming, and gone to rusty decay on
one and the same bush. The narrow paths were outlined with white stone
ale-bottles, turned upside down and driven into the soft ground, and
under the rustling tent of a lilac bush there were three or four clay
pots filled with dry earth. There was a railed porch on the east side
of the house, with vines climbing on strings about it, and here the old
woman, clean with the wonderful, cool-fingered cleanness of frail yet
energetic seventy-five, would sit reading in the afternoon shade that
fell from the great shoulders of the blue mountains.

Inside were three rooms; there was no bathroom, no light but the
kerosene lamps the old hands tended daily, no warmth but the small
kitchen stove. All the furniture was old and shabby and cheap, and the
antimacassars and pictures and teacups old Mrs. Mumford prized so
dearly were of no value except for association's sake. Rachael's
great-grandmother lived upon tea and toast and fruit sauce; sometimes
she picked a dish of peas in her own garden and sometimes made herself
a rice pudding, but if her children brought her in a chicken or a bowl
of soup she always gave it away to some poorer neighbor who was ill, or
who was "nursing that great strapping baby."

She read the Bible to Rachael and exhorted the half-believing,
half-ashamed child to lay its lessons to heart.

"Your life will be full of change and of pleasure, there will be many
temptations and much responsibility," said the sweet, stern, thin old
voice. "Arm yourself against the wickedness of the world!"

Rachael, pulling the old collie's silky ears, thought nothing of the
wickedness of the world but much of possible change and pleasure. She
hoped her aged relative was right; certainly one would suppose Granny
to be right in anything she said.

The time would have swiftly come when the child's changing heart would
have found no room for this association, but before Rachael was twelve
Granny was gone, the little house, with its few poor treasures shut
inside it, was closed and empty. And only a year or two later a far
more important change came into the girl's life. She had always
disliked Los Lobos, had schemed and brooded and fretted incessantly
through her childhood. It was with astonished delight that she heard
that her parents, who had never, in a financial sense, drawn a free
breath since their marriage, who had worried and contrived, who had
tried indifference and bravado and strictest economy by turns, had sold
their ranch for almost two thousand dollars more than its accumulated
mortgages, and were going to England.

It was a glorious adventure for Rachael, even though she was too shrewd
not to suspect the extreme hazard of the move. She talked in Los Lobos
of her father's "people," hinted that "the family, you know, thinks
we'd better be there," but she knew in her heart that a few months
might find them all beggars.

Her father bought her a loose, big, soft blue coat in San Francisco,
and a dashing little soft hat for the steamer. Rachael never forgot
these garments throughout her entire life. It mattered not how
countrified the gown under the coat, how plain the shoes on her slender
feet. Their beauty, their becomingness, their comfort, actually colored
her days. For twenty dollars she was transformed; she knew herself to
be pretty and picturesque. "That charming little girl with the dark
braids, going to England," she heard some man on the steamer say. The
ranch, the chickens, weeds, and preserving, the dusty roads and shabby
stores of Los Lobos were gone; she was no longer a gawky child; she was
a young lady in a loose, soft, rough blue coat, with a black quill in
her soft blue hat.

England received her wandering son coolly, but Rachael never knew it.
Her radiant dream--or was it an awakening?--went on. Her mother, a
neat, faded, querulous little woman, whose one great service was in
sparing her husband any of the jars of life, was keyed to frantic
anxiety lest Jerry be unappreciated, now that he had come back. Clara
met the few men to whom her husband introduced her in London with
feverish eagerness; afraid--after fifteen years--to say one word that
might suggest her own concern in Jerry's future, quivering to
cross-examine him, when they were alone, as to what had been said, and
implied, and suggested.

Nothing definite followed. They lived for a month or two at a
delightful roomy boarding-house in London, where the modest meals Clara
ordered appeared as if by magic, and where Miss Fairfax never sullied
her pretty hands with dishwashing. Then they went to visit "Aunt Elsie"
in a suburban villa for several weeks, a visit Rachael never thought of
afterward without a memory of stuffy, neat, warm rooms, and a gushing
of canaries' voices. Then they went down to Sussex, in the delicious
fullness of spring, to live with several other persons in a dark
country house, where "Cousin Harold" died, and there was much odorous
crepe and a funeral. Cousin Harold evidently left something to Gerald.
Rachael knew money was not an immediate problem. Hot weather came, and
they went to the seaside with an efficient relative called Ethel, and
Ethel's five children. Later, back in London, Gerald said, in his
daughter's hearing, that he had made "rather a good thing of that
little game of Bobbie's. Enough to tide us over--what? Especially if
the Dickies ask us down for a bit," he had added. The Dickies did ask
them down for a bit. They went other places. Gerald made a little money
on the races, made "a good thing" of this, and "turned a bit over on
that." Weeks made months and months years, and still they drifted
cheerfully about, Gerald happier than he had ever been in exile, Clara
fearful, admiring, ill at ease, Rachael in a girl's paradise.

She grew beautiful, with a fine and distinguished beauty definite in
its appeal; before she was seven-teen she had her little reputation for
it; she moved easily into a circle higher than even her father had ever
known. She was witty, young, lovely, and in this happier atmosphere her
natural gayety and generosity might well develop. She went about
continually, and every year the circle of her friends was widened by
more distinguished names.

At seventeen Mrs. Gouveneur Pomeroy of New York brought the young
beauty back with her own daughter, Persis, for a winter in the great
American city, and when Persis died Rachael indeed became almost as
dear to the stricken parents. When she went back to London they gave
her not only gifts but money, and for two years she returned to them
for long visits. So America had a chance to admire the ravishing Miss
Fairfax, too, and Rachael had many conquests and one or two serious
affairs. The girls had their first dances at the Belvedere Club;
Rachael met them all, who were later to be her neighbors: the Morans
and Parmalees, the Vanderwalls and the Torrences, and the Chases. She
met Clarence Breckenridge and his wife, and the exquisitely dressed
little girl who was Billy to-day.

And through all her adventures she looked calmly, confidently, and with
conscious enjoyment for a husband. She flirted a little, and danced and
swam and drove and played golf and tennis a great deal, but she never
lost sight for an instant of the serious business of life. Money she
must have--it was almost as essential to her as air--and money she
could only secure through a marriage.

The young Englishman who was her first choice, in her twentieth year,
had every qualification in the world. When he died, two or three months
before the wedding-day, Rachael's mother was fond of saying in an aside
to close friends that the girl's heart was broken. Rachael, lovely in
her black, went down to stay with Stephen's mother, and for several
weeks was that elderly lady's greatest comfort in life. Silent and
serious, her manner the perfection of quiet grief, only Rachael herself
knew how little the memory of Stephen interfered with her long reveries
as she took his collies about in the soft autumn fogs. Only Rachael
knew how the sight of Trecastle Hall, the horses, the servants, and the
park filled her heart with despair. She might have been Lady Trecastle!
All this might so easily have been her own!

She had loved Stephen, of course, she told herself; loving, with
Rachael, simply meant a willingness to accept and to give. But love was
of course a luxury; she was after the necessities of life. Well, she
had played and lost, but she could play again. So she went to the
Pomeroys' for the winter, and in the spring was brought back to London
by her father's sudden death.

Gerald Fairfax's life insurance gave his widow a far more secured
income than he had ever given his wife. It was microscopic, to be sure,
but Clara Fairfax was a practised economist. The ladies settled in
Paris, and Rachael was seriously considering a French marriage when, by
the merest chance, in the street one day, a small homesick girl
clutched at her thin black skirt, and sent her an imploring smile.
Rachael, looking graciously down from under the shade of her frilly
black parasol, recognized the little Breckenridge girl, obviously
afflicted with a cold and lonesomeness and strangeness. Enslaving the
French nurse with three perfectly pronounced sentences, Rachael went
home with the clinging Carol, put her to bed, cheered her empty little
interior with soup, soothed her off to sleep, and was ready to meet her
crazed and terrified father with a long lecture on the care of young
children, when, after an unavoidable afternoon of business, he came
back to his hotel.

The rest followed. Rachael liked Clarence, finding it agreeable that he
knew how to dress, how to order a dinner, tip servants, and take care
of a woman in a crowd. His family was one of the oldest in America, and
he was rich. She was sorry that Billy's mother was living, but then one
couldn't have everything, and, after all, she was married again, which
seemed to mitigate the annoyance. Rachael said to herself that this was
a wiser marriage than the proposed one with poor Stephen: Stephen had
been a wild, romantic boy, full of fresh passion and dazed with
exultant dreams; Clarence was a man, longing less for moonshine and
roses and the presence of his beloved one than for a gracious,
distinguished woman who would take her place before the world as
mistress of his home and guardian of his child.

She had sometimes doubted her power to make Stephen happy--Stephen, who
talked with all a boy's heavenly shyness of long days tramping the
woods and long nights over the fire, of little sons and daughters
romping in the Trecastle gardens; but she entered into her marriage
with Clarence Breckenridge with entire self-confidence. She had been
struggling more or less definitely all her life toward just such a
position as this; it was a comparatively easy matter to fill it, now
that she had got it.

Carol she considered a decided asset. The child adored her, and her
services to Carol were so much good added to the beauty, charm, and
wisdom that she brought into the bargain. That Clarence could ask more
in the way of beauty, wisdom, and charm was not conceivable; Rachael
knew her own value too well to have any doubts on that score.

And had her husband been a strong man, her dignified and ripened
loveliness must inevitably have won him. She stood ready to be won. She
held to her bond in all generosity. What heart and soul and body could
do for him was his to claim. She did not love him, but she did not need
love's glamour to show her what her exact value to him might be; what
was her natural return for all her marriage gave her.

But quick-witted and cold-blooded as she was, she could not see that
Clarence was actually a little afraid of her. He had been too rich all
his life to count his money as an argument in his favor, and although
he was not clever he knew Rachael did not love him, and hardly supposed
that she ever could.

He felt with paternal blindness that she had married him partly for the
child's sake, and returned to the companionship of his daughter with a
real sense of relief.

Rachael, in turn, was puzzled. Carol was undeniably a pretty child,
with all a spoiled child's confident charm, but in all good-natured
generosity Rachael could not see in her the subtle and irresistible
fascinations that her father so eagerly exploited. Surely no girl of
ten, however gifted, could be reasonably supposed to eclipse completely
the woman Rachael knew herself to be; surely no parental infatuation
could extend itself to the point of a remarriage with the bettering of
a small child's position alone the object.

Philosophy came promptly to the aid of the new-made wife. Billy was a
child, and Clarence a greater child. The situation was annoying, was
belittling to her own pride, but she would meet it with dignity
nevertheless. After all, the visible benefits of the marriage were
still hers: the new car, the new furs, the new and wonderful sense of
financial ease, of social certainty.

She schooled herself to listen with an indulgent smile to her husband's
fond rhapsodies about his daughter. She agreed amiably that Billy would
be a great beauty, a heart-breaker, that "the little monkey had all the
other women crazy with jealousy now, by Jove!" She selected the little
gowns and hats in which the radiant Billy went off for long days alone
with "Daddy," and she presently graciously consented to share the
little girl's luxurious room because Billy sometimes awakened nervously
at night. Rachael had been accustomed to difficulties in dealing with
the persons nearest her; she met them resolutely. Sometimes a baffling
sense of failure smote the surface of her life, like a cold wind that
turns to white metal the smooth waters of a lake, but she held her head
proudly above it, and even Clarence and his daughter never guessed what
she endured. What did it matter? Rachael asked herself wearily. She had
not asked for love. She had resolutely exchanged what she had to give
for what she had determined to get; Clarence had made no blind
protestations, had expected no golden romance. He admired her; she knew
he thought it was splendid of her to manage the engagement and marriage
with so little fuss; perhaps his jaded pulses fluttered a little when
Rachael, exquisite in her bridal newness, stooped at the railway
station to give the drooping Billy a good-bye kiss, and promise that in
three days they would be back to rescue her from the hated governess;
but paramount above all other emotions, she suspected, was the
tremendous satisfaction of having gained just the right woman to
straighten out his tangled domestic affairs, just the mother, as the
years went by, to do the correct thing for Billy.

Of some of these things the woman who sat idly before the library fire
was thinking, as the quiet evening wore on, and the purring of the
flames and the ticking of the little mantel clock accented rather than
disturbed the stillness. She was unhappy with a cold, dry wretchedness
that was deeper than any pang of passion or of hate. The people she
met, the books she read, the gowns she planned so carefully, and the
social events that were her life, all--all--were dust and ashes.
Clarence was less a disappointment and a shame to her than an
annoyance; he neglected her, he humiliated her, true, but this meant
infinitely less than that he bored her so mercilessly. Billy, with her
youthful complacencies and arts, bored her; the sympathy of a few close
friends bored her as much as the admiration and envy of the many who
were not close. Cards, golf, dinners, and dances bored her. Rachael
thought tonight of a woman she had known closely, a beautiful woman,
too, and a rich and gifted woman, who, not many months ago, had quietly
ended it all, had been found by horrified maids in her gray-and-silver
boudoir lovelier than ever, in fixed and peaceful beauty, with the soft
folds of her lacy gown spreading like the petals of a great flower
about her and the little gleam of an empty bottle in her still, ringed
hand...

A voice broke the library stillness. Rachael roused herself.

"What is it, Helda?" she asked. "Doctor Gregory? Ask him to come in.
And ask Alfred--is Alfred still downstairs?--ask him to go up and see
if Mr. Breckenridge is awake.

"This is very decent of you, Greg," she said, a moment later, as the
doctor came into the room. "It doesn't seem right to interfere with
your dinner for the same old stupid thing!"

"Great pleasure to do anything for you, Rachael," the newcomer said
promptly and smilingly with the almost perfunctory courtesy that was a
part of Warren Gregory's stock in trade. "You don't call on me often! I
wish you did!"

She said to herself, as they both sat down before the fire, that it was
probably true. Doctor Gregory was notoriously glad of an opportunity to
serve his friends. He had not at all regretted the necessity of leaving
his dinner partner at the salad for a professional call. He was quite
ready to enjoy the Breckenridge sitting-room, the fire, the lamplight,
the company of a beautiful woman. Rachael and he knew each other well,
almost intimately; they had been friends for many years. She had often
been his guest at the opera, had often chaperoned his dinner-parties at
the club, for Warren Gregory's only woman relative was his old mother,
who was neither of an age nor a type to take any part in his social
life.

He was forty, handsome, dignified, with touches of gray in his
close-clipped hair, but no other sign of years in his face or his big,
well-built figure. He had clever, fine eyes behind black-rimmed
glasses, a surgeon's clever hands, a pleasant voice. He lived with his
mother in a fine old house on Washington Square, in New York City, and
worked as tirelessly as if he were a penniless be ginner at his
profession instead of a rich man, a rich woman's heir, and already
recognized as a genius in his own line.

All women liked him, and he liked them all. He sent them books, marked
essays in magazines for their individual consideration, took them to
concerts, remembered their birthdays. But his only close friends were
men, the men with whom he played tennis and golf, or with whom he was
associated in his work.

With all his cleverness and all his charm, Warren Gregory was not a
romantic figure in the eyes of most women. He had inherited from his
old Irish mother a certain mildness, and a lenience, where they were
concerned. He neither judged them nor idolized them. They belonged only
to his leisure hours. His real life was in his club, in his books, and
in the hospital world where there were children's tiny bones to set. He
was conscious, as a man born in a different circle always is conscious,
that he had, by a series of pleasant chances, been pushed straight into
the inner heart of the social group whose doors are so resolutely
closed to many men and women, and he liked it. His grand father had had
blood but no money, his mother money but no social claim. He inherited,
with the O'Connell millions, the Gregory name, and for perhaps ten
years he had enjoyed an unchallenged popularity. He had inherited also,
without knowing it, a definitely different standard from that held by
all the men and women about him. In his simple, unobtrusive way he held
aloof from much that they said and did. Greg, said the woman, was a
regular Puritan about gossip, about drinking, about gambling.

They never suspected the truth: that he was shy. Sure of his touch as a
surgeon, pleasantly definite about books and pictures, spontaneous and
daring in the tennis court or on the links, under his friendly manner
with women was the embarrassment of a young boy.

Before his tenth year his rigidly conscientious mother had instilled
into the wondering little-boy mind certain mysterious yet positive
moral laws. Purity and self-control were in the air he breathed while
at her side, and although a few years later school and college had
claimed him, the effect of those early lessons was definite upon his
character. Diffidence and a sort of fear had protected him, far more
effectually than any other means might have done, from the common vices
of his age, and in those days a certain good-natured scorn from all his
associates made him feel even more than his natural shyness, and marked
him rather apart from other young men.

Keenly aware of this, it had been a tremendous surprise to the young
physician, returning from post-graduate work in Germany a few years
later, to find that what had once been considered a sort of laughable
weakness in him was called strength of character now; that what had
been a clumsy boy's inarticulateness was more charitably construed into
the silence of a clever man who will not waste his words; and that
mothers whose sons he had once envied for their worldly wisdom were
turning to him for advice as to the extrication of these same sons from
all sorts of difficulties.

Being no fool, he accepted the changed attitude with great readiness,
devoting himself to his work and his mother, and pleasantly conscious
that he was a success. He let women alone, except where music and art,
golf and the club theatricals were the topic of interest, and,
consequently, had come to his fortieth year with some little awe and
diffidence still left for them in his secret heart. Rachael had told
him, not long ago, that she believed he took no interest in women older
than fourteen and younger than fifty, and there was some truth in the
charge. But he was conscious to-night of taking a distinct interest in
her as he sat down beside her fire.

He had never seen her so beautiful, he thought. She had dressed so
hastily, so carelessly, that an utter simplicity enhanced the natural
charm. Her dark hair was simply massed, her gown was devoid of
ornament, her hands bare, except for her wedding-ring. On her earnest,
exquisite face the occasion had stamped a certain soberness, she was
neither hostess nor guest to-night; just a heartsick wife under the
shadow of anger and shame.

"Well, what is it to-night?" Warren Gregory asked kindly.

"Oh, the same old thing, Greg. The Berry Stokes' dinner, you know!"

"Shame!" the doctor said warmly, touched by her obvious depression.
"I'll go up. I can give him some pills. But you know, he can't keep
this up forever, Rachael. He's killing himself!"

In her sensitive mood the mildly reproachful tone was too much.
Rachael's breast rose, her eyes brightened angrily.

"Perhaps you'll tell me what more I can do, Greg!"

He looked at her in surprise; the shell of Mrs. Breckenridge's cool
reserve was not often pierced.

"My dear girl--" he stammered. "Why, Rachael--!"

For battling with a moment of emotion she had flung her beautiful head
back against the brilliant cretonne of the chair, her eyes closed, her
hands grasping the chair-arms. A tear slipped from under her lids.

"I didn't for one second mean--" he began again uncomfortably.

Suddenly she straightened herself in her chair, and opened her eyes
widely. He saw her lovely breast, under its filmy black chiffon, rise
stormily. Her voice was rich with protest.

"No, you didn't mean anything, Greg, nobody means anything! Nobody is
anything but sorry for me: you, Billy, Elinor, the woman who expected
us at dinner to-night, the servants at the club!" she said hotly.
"Nobody blames me, and yet every one wonders how it happens! Nobody
thinks it anything but a little amusing, a little shocking. I am to
write the notes, and make the excuses, and be shamed--and
shamed--shamed--"

Her voice broke. She rose to her feet, and rested an elbow on the
mantel, and stared moodily at the fire. There was a silence.

"Rachael, I'm sorry!" Gregory said presently, impulsively.

Instantly her April smile rewarded him.

"I know you are, Greg!" she answered gratefully. "And I know," she
added, in a low tone, "that you are one of the persons who will
understand--when I end it all!"

"End it all!" he echoed sharply.

"Not suicide," she reassured him smilingly. She flung herself back in
her chair again, holding her white hand, with its ring, between her
face and the fire. "No," she said thoughtfully, "I mean divorce."

There eyes met; both were pale, serious.

"Divorce!" he echoed, after a pause. "I never thought of it--for you!"

"I haven't thought of it myself, much," Rachael admitted, with a
troubled smile.

As a matter of fact she had thought of it, since the early days of her
marriage, but never as an actual possibility. She had preferred bondage
and social position to freedom and the uncomfortable status of the
divorced woman. She realized now that she might think of it in a
slightly different way. She had been a penniless nobody seven years
ago; she was a personage now. The mere fact that he was a Breckenridge
would win some sympathy for Clarence, but she would have her faction,
too.

More than that, she would never be younger, never handsomer, never
better able to take the plunge, and face the consequences.

"I'm twenty-eight, Greg," she said reasonably, "I'm not stupid, I'm not
plain--don't interrupt me! Is this to be my fate? I'm capable of
loving--of living--I don't want to be bored--bored--bored for the rest
of my life!"

Warren Gregory, stunned and surprised, eyed her sympathetically.

"Belvedere Bay bore you?" he asked, smiling a little uneasily.

"No--it's not that. I don't want more dinners and dances and jewels and
gowns!" Rachael answered musingly. She stared sombrely at the fire, and
there was a moment's silence.

Suddenly her mood changed. She smiled, and locking her hands together,
as she leaned far forward in her chair, she looked straight into his
eyes.

"Greg," she said, "do you know what I'd like to be? I'd like to be far
away from cities and people, a fisherman's wife on an ocean shore, with
a baby coming every year, and just the delicious sea to watch! I could
be a good wife, Greg, if anybody really--loved me!"

Laughing as she looked at him, she did not disguise the fact that tears
misted her lashes. Warren Gregory felt himself stirred as he had not
been before in his life.

"Well," he said, with an unsteady laugh, "you could be anything! With
you for his wife, what couldn't a man do!"

Hardly conscious of what he did or said, he got to his feet, and she
stood, too, smiling up at him. Both were breathing hard.

"To think," he said, with a sort of repressed violence, "that you, of
all women, should be Clarence Breckenridge's wife!"

"Not long!" she answered, in a whisper.

"You mean that you are really going to leave him, Rachael?"

"I mean that I must, Greg, if I am not to go mad!"

"And where will you go?" she asked.

"Oh--to Vera, to Elinor." She paused, frowning. "Or away by myself,"
she decided suddenly. "Away from them all!"

"Rachael," he said quickly, "will you come to my mother?"

Rachael smiled. "To your mother!"

He read her incredulity in her voice.

"But she loves you," he said eagerly. "And she'd be--we'd both be so
proud to show people--to prove--that we knew where the right lay!"

"My dear Don Quixote," she answered affectionately, "I love you for
asking me! But I will be better alone. I must think, and plan. I've
made a mess of my life so far, Greg; I must take the next step
carefully!"

He was clinging to her hands as she stood, in all her grave beauty,
before him.

"If I hadn't been such a bat, Rachael, all those eleven years ago!" he
said, daringly, breathlessly.

"Have we known each other so long, Greg?"

"Ever since that first visit of yours with little Persis Pomeroy! And I
remember you so well, Rachael. I remember that Bobby Governeur was
enslaved!"

"Dear old Bobby! But I don't remember you, Greg!"

"Because I was thirty then, my dear, and you were seventeen! I was just
home from four years' work in Germany; I was afraid of girls your age!"

"Afraid--of ME?" The three words were like a caress, like holding her
in his arms.

"I'm afraid so!" he said, not quite steadily. "I'm afraid I've always
liked you too well. I--I CARE--that you're unhappy, that you're
unkindly treated. I--I--wish I could do something, Rachael."

"You DO do something," she said, deeply stirred in her turn. "I'm--you
don't know how fond I am of you, Greg!"

For answer she felt his arms about her, and for a throbbing minute they
stood so; Rachael braced lightly, her beautiful breast rising and
falling, her breath coming quickly. Her magnificent eyes, wide-open,
like a frightened child's, were fixed steadily upon him. He caught the
fragrance of her hair, of her fresh skin; he felt the softness and
firmness of her slender arms.

"Rachael!" he said, in a sharp whisper. "Don't--don't say that--if you
don't--mean it!"

"Greg!" she answered, in the same tone. "Don't--frighten me!"

Instantly she was free, and he was standing by the fire with folded
arms, looking at her.

"You have missed love, and I have missed it," Warren Gregory said
presently. "We'll be patient, Rachael. I'll wait; we'll both wait--"

"Greg!" she could only answer still in that stricken whisper, still
pale. She stood just as he had left her.

A silence fell between them. The physician took out a cigarette from
his gold case with trembling ringers.

"I'm a little giddy, Rachael," he said after a moment. "I--on my honor
I don't know what's happened to me! You're the most wonderful woman in
the world--I've always thought that--but it never occurred to me--the
possibility--"

He paused, confused, unable to find the right words.

"You've been facing this all alone," he continued presently. "Poor
Rachael! You've been splendid--wonderfully brave! You have me beside
you now; I'll help you if I may. Some day we may find a way out! Well,"
he finished abruptly, "suppose I go up and see Clarence?"

For answer she rose, and without speaking again went ahead of him up
the stairway and left him at the door of her husband's room. He did not
see her again that night.

Half an hour later he came down, dismissed his car, and walked home
under the spring stars. In his veins, like a fire, still ran the
excited, glorious consciousness of his madness. In his ears still
echoed the wonderful golden voice; he could hear her very words, and he
took certain phrases from his memory, and gloated over them as another
man might have gloated over strings of pearls: "I'd like to be far away
from cities and people, a fisherman's wife on an ocean shore with a
baby coming every year and just the delicious sea to watch!"
"Greg--don't frighten me!"

Exquisite, desirable, enchanting--every inch of her--her voice, her
eyes, her slender hand with its gold circle. What a woman! What a wife!
What radiant youth and beauty and charm--and all trampled in the mire
by Clarence Breckenridge, of all insensate brutes! How could laughter
and courage and beauty survive it?

He was going to the club, a mile away from the Breckenridge house, but
long before the visions born that evening were exhausted, he saw the
familiar lights, and the awninged porches, and heard the faint echoes
of the orchestra. They were dancing.

Warren Gregory turned away again, and plunged into the darkness of the
roadside afresh. "My dear Don Quixote!" With what a look of motherly
amusement and tenderness she had said it. What a woman! He had never
kissed her. He had never even thought of kissing Clarence
Breckenridge's wife.

He thought of his mother, tried to forget her with a philosophical
shrug, and found that the slender, black-clad, quiet-voiced vision was
not to be so easily dismissed. It was said of old Madam Gregory that
she had never been heard to raise her voice in the course of her sixty
honored years. Of the four sons she had borne, three were dead, and the
husband she had loved so faithfully lay beside them. She was slightly
crippled, her outings confined to a slow drive every day. She was
solitary in a retinue of servants. But that modulated voice and those
cool, temperate eyes were still a power. His mother's displeasure was a
very real thing to Warren Gregory, and the thought of adding another
sorrow to the weight on those thin shoulders was not an easy one for
him to entertain.

It would be a sorrow. Mrs. Gregory was a rigid Catholic, her life's one
prayer nowadays was that her beloved son might become one, too. Her
marriage at seventeen to a non-Catholic had been undertaken in the firm
conviction that faith like hers must win the conversion of her beloved
James, the best, the most honorable of men. When her oldest son was
born, and given his father's name, she saw, in her husband's
willingness to further plans for the baptism, definite cause for hope.
Another son was born, there was another christening; it was the
father's own hand that gave the third baby lay-baptism only a few
moments before the tiny life slipped back into the eternity from which
it had so lately come.

A year or two later a fourth son was born. Presently the dignified Mrs.
Gregory was taking a trio of small, sleek-headed boys to Sunday-school,
watching every phase in the development of their awakening souls with
terror and with hope. What fears she suffered in spirit during those
years no one but herself knew. Outwardly, the hospitable, gracious life
of the great house went on; the Gregorys were prominent in charities,
they opened their mountain camp for the summer, they travelled abroad,
they had an audience with the Pope. Time went on, and the
twelve-year-old George was taken from them, breaking the father's
heart, said the watching world. But there was a strange calm in the
mother's eyes as they rested on the dead child's serene face: Heaven
had her free offering, now she must have her reward.

A few months later James Gregory became a convert to her religion.
Charles, the second son, had never wavered from his mother's faith, and
rejoiced with her in this great event. But the first-born, Warren, as
all but his mother called him, to avoid confusion with his father, was
a junior in college when these changes took place, and when he came
home for the long vacation his mother knew what her cross must be for
the years to come. He listened to her with the appalling silence of the
nineteen-year-old male, he kissed her, he returned gruff, embarrassed
answers to her searching questions of his soul, and he escaped from her
with visibly expanding lungs and averted eyes. She knew that she had
lost him.

Men called him a good man, and she assented with dry lips and heavy
eyelids. Charles died, leaving a young widow and an infant son, the
father shortly followed, and Warren came home from his interne year,
and was a good son to her in her dark hour. When they began to say of
him that he would be great, she smiled sadly. "My father was a doctor,"
she said once to an old friend, "and James inherits it!" But at a
memory of her own father, erect and rosy among his girls and boys in
the family pew, she burst into tears. "I would rather have him with his
father, with George and Charles, and with my angel Francis, than have
him the greatest man that ever lived!" she said.

But if she had not made him a good Catholic she had made him a good
man, and it was a fair and honorable record that Warren Gregory could
offer to the woman he loved. Love--it had come to him at last. His
thoughts went back to Rachael. It seemed to him that he had always
known how deeply, how recklessly he loved her.

He had a thrilling memory of her as Persis Pomeroy's guest, years ago,
an awkward, delightful seventeen-year-old, with her hair in two thick
braids, looped up at the neck, and tied with a flaring black bow. He
remembered watching her, hearing for the first time the delicious voice
with its English accent: "Well, I should say it was indeed!"

"Well, I should say it was indeed!" Across more than ten years he
recalled the careless, crisp little answer to some comment from Persis,
his first precious memory of Rachael. The girls, he remembered, were
supposedly too young for a certain dance that was imminent, they were
opposing their youthful petulance--baffled roses and sunshine--to Mrs.
Pomeroy's big, placid negatives. Gregory could still see the matron's
comfortably shaking head, see Persis attacking again and again like a
frantic butterfly, and see "the little English girl," perched on the
porch rail, looking from mother to daughter smilingly, with her blue,
serious eyes.

Why had he never thought of her again until Clarence Breckenridge
brought her back with him, a bride, six years later? Or, rather, having
thought of her, as he undoubtedly had, why had he not found the time to
cross the water and go to see her? Nothing might have come of it, true.
But she might have yielded to him as readily as to Clarence
Breckenridge!

"I love her!" he said to himself, and it seemed wonderful, sad, and
sweet, joyous and terrible to admit it. "I love her. But she doesn't
love me or anyone, poor Rachael! She's forgotten me already!"




CHAPTER III


As a matter of fact, Rachael thought about him very often during the
course of the next two or three days, and after he had left her that
night she could think of nothing else. To the admiration of men she was
cheerfully accustomed; perhaps it would be safe to say that not in the
course of the past ten years had she ever found herself alone in a
man's company without evoking a more or less definite declaration of
his admiration for her. But to-night's affair was a little distinctive
for several reasons. Warren Gregory was a most exceptional man, for one
thing; he was reputedly a coldblooded man, for another; and for a
third, he had been extraordinarily in earnest. There had been no
hesitation, he had committed himself wholeheartedly. She was conscious
of a pleasurable thrill. However gracious, however gallant Warren was,
there had been no social pretence in his attitude to-night.

And for a few moments she let her imagination play pleasantly with the
situation. It was at least a new thought, and life had run in a groove
for a long, long time. Granted the preliminaries safely managed, it
would be a great triumph for the woman whom Clarence Breckenridge had
ignored to come back into this group as Warren Gregory's wife.

Rachael got into bed, flinging two or three books down beside her
pillow and lighting the shaded lamp that stood at the bedside. She
found herself unable to read.

"Wouldn't Florence and Gardner buzz!" she thought with a smile. "And if
they buzzed at the divorce, what WOULDN'T they say if I really did
remarry? But the worst of it is"--and Rachael reaching for The Way of
All Flesh sighed wearily--"the worst of it is that one never DOES carry
out plans, or _I_ never do, any more. I used to feel equal to any
situation, now I don't--getting old, perhaps. I wonder"--she stared
dreamily at the soft shadows in the big room--"I wonder if things are
as queer to most people as they are to me? I don't get much joy out of
life, as it is, and yet I don't DARE cut loose and go away. No maid, no
club, living at some cheap hotel--no, I couldn't do that! I wish there
was someone who could advise me--some disinterested person, someone
who--well, who loved me, and who knew that I've always tried to be
decent, always tried to play the game. All I want is to be reasonably
well treated; to have a good time and be among pleasant people--"

Her thoughts wandered about among the various friends whose judgment
might serve at this crisis to clear her own thoughts and simplify the
road before her. Strangely enough, Warren Gregory's own mother was the
first of whom she thought; that pure and austere and uncompromising
heart would certainly find the way. Whether Rachael had the courage to
follow it was another question. She loved old Mrs. Gregory; they were
good friends. But Rachael dismissed her with a little shudder, as from
the spatter of icy water against her bared breast. The bishop? Rachael
and Clarence duly kept a pew in one of the city's fashionable churches;
it was the Breckenridge family pew, rented by the family for a hundred
years. But they never sat in it, although Rachael felt vaguely
sometimes that for reasons undefined they should, and Clarence was apt
in moments of sentiment to reproach his wife with the statement that
his grandmother had been a faithful church woman, and his mother had
always attended church on pleasant mornings in winter.

But the bishop called on Rachael once a year, and Rachael liked him,
and mingled an air of pretty penitence for past negligences with a
gracious promise of better conduct in future. His Grace was a fine,
breezy, broadminded man, polished in manner, sympathetic, and tolerant.
He had not risen to his present eminence by too harsh a rebuke of the
sinner.

His handsome young assistant, Father Graves, as he liked to be called,
was far more radical. But a great deal was forgiven this attractive
boyish celibate by the women of the Episcopal parish. They enjoyed his
scoldings, gave him their confidences, and asked his advice, though
they never followed it. His slender, black-clad figure, with the Roman
collar, was admired by many bright eyes at receptions and church
bazaars.

Still, Rachael could not somehow consider herself as seriously asking
either of these two clergymen for advice. She could see the bishop,
fitting finely groomed fingers together, pursing his lips for a
judicial reply.

"My dear Mrs. Breckenridge, that Clarence is now passing through a most
unfortunate, most lamentable, period in his life is, alas, perfectly
true. His mother--a lovely woman--was one of my wife's dearest friends,
one of my own. His first marriage was much against her wishes, poor
dear lady, and--as my wife was saying the other day--had she lived to
see him happily married again, and her grandchild in such good hands,
it could not but have been a great joy to her. Yes. ... Now, you and I
know Clarence--know his good points, and know his faults. That's one of
the sad things about us poor human beings, we get to know each other so
well! And isn't it equally true that we're not patient enough with each
other?--oh, yes, I know we try. But do we try HARD enough? Isn't there
generally some fault on both sides, quick words, angry, hasty actions,
argument and blame, when we say things we don't mean and that we are
sure to regret, eh? We all get tired of the stupid round of daily duty,
and of the people we are nearest to--that's a sad thing, too. We'd all
like a change, like to see if we couldn't do something else better! And
so comes the break, and the cloud on a fine old name, and all because
we aren't better soldiers--we don't want to march in line! Bless me,
don't I know the feeling myself? Why, that good little wife of mine
could tell you some tales of discouragement and disenchantment that
would make you open your eyes! But she braces me up, she puts heart
into me--and the first thing I know I'm marching again!"

And having comfortably shifted the entire trend of the conversation
from his parishioner to himself and found nothing insurmountable in his
own problem, the good bishop would chuckle mischievously at finding his
eminent self quite human after all, and would suggest their going in to
find Mrs. Bishop, and having a cup of tea. These women, always restless
and dissatisfied, were a part of his work; he prided himself upon the
swiftness and tact with which he disposed of them.

Rachael's mouth twisted wryly at the thought of him. No, she could not
bare her soul to the bishop.

Nor could she approach Father Graves with any real hope of a helping
word. To seek him out in his study--that esthetically bare and yet
beautiful room, with its tobacco-brown hangings and monastic furnishing
in black oak--would be to invite mischief. To sit there, with her
eloquent eyes fixed upon his, her haunting voice wrapping itself about
his senses, would be a genuine cruelty toward a harmless,
well-intentioned youth whose heroism in abjuring the world, the flesh,
and the devil had not yet been great enough to combat his superb and
dignified egotism. At best, he would be won by Rachael's revelation of
her soul to a long and frankly indiscreet talk of his own; at worst, he
would construe her confidences in an entirely personal sense, and feel
that she came not at all to the priest and all to the man.

Dismissing him from her councils, Rachael thought of Florence Haviland,
the good and kind-hearted and capable matron who was Clarence's sister
and only near relative. She and Florence had always been good friends,
had often discussed Clarence of late. What sort of advice would
Florence's forty-five years be apt to give to Rachael's twenty-eight?
"Don't be so absurd, Rachael, half the men in our set drink as much as
Clarence does. Don't jump from the frying-pan into the fire. Remember
Elsie Rowland and Marian Cowles when you talk so lightly of divorce!"

That would be Florence's probable attitude. Still, it was a bracing
attitude, heartily positive, like everything Florence did and said. And
Florence was above everything else a church member, a prominent
Christian in her self-sacrificing wifehood and motherhood, her social
and charitable and civic work. She might be unflattering, but she would
be right. Rachael's last conscious thought, as she went off to sleep,
was that she would take the earliest possible moment to extract a
verdict from Florence.

She went into her husband's room at ten o'clock the next morning to
find Billy radiantly presiding over a loaded breakfast tray, and the
invalid, pale and pasty, and with no particular interest in food
evinced by the twitching muscles of his face, nevertheless neatly
brushed and shaved, propped up in pillows, and making a visible effort
to appear convalescent.

"How are you this morning?" Rachael asked perfunctorily, with her quick
glance moving from the books on the table to the wood fire burning
lazily behind brass firedogs. Everything was in perfect order, Helda's
touch visible everywhere.

"Fine," Clarence answered, also perfunctorily. His coffee was
untouched, and the cigarette in his long holder had gone out, but Billy
was disposing of eggs, toast, bacon, and cream with youthful zest.
Clarence's hot, sick gaze rested almost with hostility upon his wife's
cool beauty; in a gray linen gown, with a transparent white ruffle
turned back from her white throat, she looked as fresh as the fresh
spring morning.

"Headache?" said the nicely modulated, indifferent voice.

To this solicitude Clarence made no answer. A dark, ugly look came into
his face, and he turned his eyes sullenly and wearily away.

"How was the Chase dinner, Bill?" pursued the cheerful visitor,
unabashed.

"Same old thing," Carol answered briefly.

"You're not up to the Perrys' lunch to-day, are you, Clancy?"

"Oh, my God, no!" burst from the sufferer.

"Well, I'll telephone them. If Florence comes in this morning I'm going
to say you're asleep, so keep quiet up here. Do you want to see Greg
again?"

"No, I don't!" said Clarence, with unexpected vigor. "Steer him off if
you can. Preaching at me last night as if he'd never touched anything
stronger than malted milk!"

"I don't imagine I'll have much trouble steering him off," Rachael said
coldly. "His Sundays are pretty well occupied without--sick calls!"

There was a delicate and scornful emphasis on the word "sick" that
brought the blood to Clarence Breckenridge's face. Billy flushed, too,
and an angry light flamed into her eyes.

"That's not fair, Rachael!" the girl said hotly, "and you know it's
not!"

The glances of the three crossed. Billy was breathing hard; Clarence,
shakily holding a fresh match to his cold cigarette, sent a lowering
look from daughter to wife. Rachael shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, I'll have my breakfast," she said, and turning she went from the
room and downstairs to the sunshiny breakfast porch. There were flowers
on the little round table, a bright glitter was struck from silver and
glass, an icy grapefruit, brimming with juice, stood at her place. The
little room was all windows, and to-day the cretonne curtains had been
pushed back to show the garden brave in new spring green, the exquisite
freshness of elm and locust trees that bordered it, and far away the
slopes of the golf green, with the scarlet and white dots that were
early players moving over it. Sunshine flooded the world, great plumes
of white and purple lilac rustled in their tents of green leaves, a bee
blundered from the blossoming wistaria vine into the room, and
blundered out again. Far off Rachael heard a cock breaking the Sabbath
stillness with a prolonged crow, and as the clock in the dining-room
chimed one silver note for the half-hour, the bells of the church in
the little village of Belvedere Bay began to ring.

Of the comfort, the beauty, and the harmony of all this, however,
Rachael saw and felt nothing. Her brief interview with her husband had
left a bitter taste in her mouth. She felt neither courage nor appetite
for the new day. Annie carried away the blue bowl of porridge
untouched, reporting to Ellie: "She don't want no eggs, nor sausage,
nor waffles--nothing more!"

Ellie, the cook, who boarded a four-year-old daughter with the gardener
and his wife, at the gate-lodge, was deep in the robust charms of this
young person, and not sorry to be uninterrupted.

"Thank goodness she don't," she said. "Do you want a little waffle all
for yourself, Lovey? Do you want to pour the batter into Ma's iron
yourself? Pin a napkin round her, Annie! An' then you can eat it out on
the steps, darlin', because it just seems to be a shame to spend a
minute indoors when God sends us a mornin' like this!"

"It must have been grand, walking to church this morning, all right,"
said Alfred, who was busy with golf sticks and emery on the vine-shaded
porch.

"It was!" said Ellie and Annie together, and Annie added: "Rose from
Bowditch's was there, and she says she can't get away but about once a
month. She always has to wait on the children's breakfast at eight, and
then down comes the others at half-past nine, or later, the way she
never has a moment until it's too late for High! I told her she had a
right to look for another place!"

"There's worse places than this," Ellie said, watching her small
daughter begin on her waffle. A general nodding of heads in a contented
silence indicated that there was some happiness in the Breckenridge
household even though it was below stairs.

Rachael's sombre revery was presently interrupted by the smooth
crushing of wheels on the pebbled drive and the announcement of Mrs.
Haviland, who followed her name promptly into the breakfast-room. A
fine, large, beautifully gowned woman, with a prayer book in her
white-gloved hand, and a veil holding her close, handsome spring hat in
place, she glanced at the coffee and hot bread with superiority only
possible to a person whose own breakfast is several hours past.

"Rachael, you lazy woman!" said Florence Haviland lightly, breathing
deep, as a heavy woman in tight corsets must perforce breathe on a warm
spring morning. "Do you realize that it's almost eleven o'clock?"

"Perfectly!" Mrs. Breckenridge said. "I slept until nine, and felt
quite proud of myself to think that I had got through so much of the
day!"

Mrs. Haviland gave her a sharp look in answer, not quite disapproving,
yet far from pleased.

"I started the girlies off to eight o'clock service," she said capably.
"Fraulien went with them, and that leaves the maids free to go when
they please." This was one of Mrs. Haviland's favorite illusions.
"Gardner begged off this morning, he's been so good about going lately
that I couldn't very well refuse, so I started early and have just
dropped him at the club."

"Was Gardner at the Berry Stokes bachelor dinner on Friday night?"
asked Rachael. Mrs. Haviland was all comprehension at once.

"No, he couldn't. Mr. Payne of the London branch was here you know, and
Gardner's been terribly tied. He left yesterday, thank goodness.
Clarence went of course? Oh, dear, dear, dear!"

The last three words came on a gentle sigh. Clarence's sister
compressed her lips and shook her handsome head.

"Is he very bad?" she asked reluctantly.

"Pretty much as usual," Rachael answered philosophically. "I had Greg
in." And suddenly, unexpectedly, she felt a quick happy flutter at her
heart, and a roseate mist drifted before her eyes.

"It's disgraceful!" Mrs. Haviland said, eying Rachael hopefully for a
wifely denial. As this was not forthcoming, she went on briskly:
"However, my dear, Clarence isn't the only one! They say Fred Bowditch
is actually"--her voice sank to a discreet undertone as she added the
word--"violent; and poor Lucy Pickering needed a rest cure the moment
she got her divorce, she was in such a nervous state. I'm not defending
Clarence--"

"What are you doing, then?" Rachael asked, with her cool smile.

"Well, I--" Mrs. Haviland, who had been drifting comfortably along on a
tide of words, stopped, a little at a loss. "I hope I don't have to
defend your own husband to you, Rachael," she said reproachfully.

"I'm getting pretty tired of it," said Rachael moodily.

Mrs. Haviland watched the downcast beautiful face opposite her with a
sense of growing alarm.

"My dear," she said impressively, "of course it's hard for you; we all
know that. But just at this time, Rachael, it would be absolutely FATAL
to have any open break with Clarence--"

Rachael flung up her head impatiently, then dropped her face in her
hands.

"I don't want any open break," she muttered.

"You do? Oh, you DON'T?" Mrs. Haviland questioned anxiously. "No, of
course you don't. He's not himself now, for several reasons. For
one--and that's what I specially came to speak to you about--for one
thing, he's terribly worried about Carol. Carol," repeated Mrs.
Haviland significantly, "and Joe Pickering."

Rachael raised sombre eyes, but did not speak.

"Is Carol here?" her aunt asked delicately.

"Dressing," Rachael answered briefly.

"Do you realize," Mrs. Haviland said, "that everyone is beginning to
talk?"

"Perfectly," Rachael admitted. "But what do you expect me to do?"

"SOMETHING must be done," said the other woman firmly.

"By whom?" Rachael countered lightly.

"Well--by Clarence, I suppose," Mrs. Haviland suggested discontentedly.

"Clarence!" Rachael's tone was but a scornful breath. Her glance toward
the ceiling evoked more clearly than any words a vision of Clarence's
condition at the moment.

"Well, I suppose he can't do anything just now, anyway," his sister
conceded ruefully. "Can't you--couldn't you talk to her, Rachael?"

"Talk to her?" Mrs. Breckenridge smiled at some memory. "My dear
Florence, you don't suppose I haven't talked to her!"

"Well, I suppose of course you have," Mrs. Haviland said hastily. "But
my dear, it's dreadful! People are beginning to ask questions; a
reporter--we don't know who he was--telephoned Gardner. Of course
Gardner hung up--"

"I can say no more than I have said," Rachael observed thoughtfully.
"What authority have I? Clarence could influence her, I think, but she
lies simply and flatly to Clarence."

Mrs. Haviland winced at the ugly word.

"Joe drinks," Rachael went on, "but he doesn't drink as much as her
adored Daddy does. Joe is thirty-nine and Billy is seventeen--well,
that's not his fault. Joe is divorced--well, but Carol's mother is
living, and Clarence's second wife isn't exactly ostracised by society!
A clergyman of your own church married Clarence and me--" The little
scornful twist of the beautiful mouth stung a church woman conscious of
personal integrity, and Mrs. Haviland said:

"A great many of them won't! The church is going to take a stand in the
matter. The bishops are considering a canon. ..."

Mrs. Breckenridge shrugged her shoulders indifferently. Theology did
not interest her.

"And as Billy is too young and too blind to see that Joe isn't a
gentleman," she continued, "or to realize that Lucy got her divorce
against his will, to believe that her money might well influence a
gentleman of Joe's luxurious tastes and dislike for office work--why, I
suppose they will be married!"

"Never!" said Florence Haviland, with some heat, "DON'T!"

"Unless Clarence shoots him," submitted Rachael. A look of intense
anxiety clouded Mrs. Haviland's eyes.

"I believe he would," she said, in a wretched whisper, with a cautious
glance about.

"He might," his wife said seriously. "If ever it comes to that, we
shall simply have to keep them apart. You see Billy--the clever little
devil--"

"Oh, Rachael, DON'T use such words!" said the church woman. "Father
Graves was saying only the other day that one's speech should be 'yea,
yea' and--"

"I daresay!" Mrs. Breckenridge's smile was indulgent. It had been many
years since Florence had succeeded in ruffling her. "Billy, then," she
resumed, "keeps her father happy in the thought that he is all the
world to her, and that her occasional chats with Joe are of an entirely
uplifting and impersonal character."

"Impersonal! Uplifting!" Mrs. Haviland repeated indignantly. "There
wasn't very much uplift about them the other night. Gardner and I
stopped in to see if we couldn't take you to the Hoyts', but you'd
gone. Carol had on that flame-colored dress of hers, her hair was
fluffed all over her ears in that silly way the girls do now; Joe
couldn't take his eyes off her. The only light they had in the
drawing-room was the yellow lamp and the fire; it was the coziest thing
I ever saw!"

"Vivvy Sartoris was here!" Rachael said quickly.

"Don't you believe it, my dear!" Mrs. Haviland returned triumphantly.
"Carol was very demure, 'Tante' this and 'Tante' that, but I knew right
away that something was amiss! 'Oh,' I said right out flatly, 'are you
alone here, Carol?' and she answered very prettily: 'Vivian was to be
here, but she hasn't come yet!' This was after half-past seven."

"I understood Vivian WAS here," said Rachael, flushing darkly. "Let me
see--the next morning--where was I? Oh, yes, it was your luncheon, and
Billy had gone out for some tennis when I came downstairs. I supposed
of course--but I didn't ask. I DID ask Helda what time she had let the
gentleman out and she said before eleven--not much after half-past ten,
in fact."

"You see, we mustn't go on suppositions and halftruths any more," said
Mrs. Haviland in delicate reproach. "When we have that wonderful and
delicate thing, a girl's soul, to deal with, we must be SURE."

"I suppose I'd better tell Clarence that--about Wednesday night,"
Rachael said, downing with some effort an impulse to ask Florence not
to be so smug.

"Well, I think you had," the other agreed, with visible relief.

"As for me," Mrs. Breckenridge said, nettled by her sister-in-law's
attitude, and mischievously interested in the effect of her
thunderbolt, "I'm just desperately tired of it. I can't see that I'm
doing Clarence, or Billy, or myself, any good! I'd like to resign, and
let somebody else try for a while!"

Steel leaped into Mrs. Haviland's light-blue eyes. She felt the shock
in every fibre of body and soul, but she flung herself gallantly into
the charge. Her large form straightened, her expression achieved a
certain remoteness.

"What do you mean by that?" she asked sharply.

"The usual thing, I suppose," Rachael answered indifferently.

The older woman, watching her closely, essayed a brief, dry laugh.

"Don't talk absurdities," she said boldly. But Rachael saw the
uneasiness under the assured manner, and smiled to herself.

"It's not absurd at all," she protested, still with her smiling,
half-negligent air; "I've put it off years longer than most women
would; now I'm getting rather tired."

"It's a great mistake to talk that way, whether you mean it or not,"
Mrs. Haviland said, after an uncomfortable moment, during which her
face flushed, and her breath began to come rather fast. "But you're
joking, of course; you're too sensible to take any step that would only
plunge you into fresh difficulties. Clarence is very trying, I know--we
all know that--but let's try to face the situation sensibly, and not
fly off the handle like this! Why, Rachael dear, I can hardly believe
it's your cool-headed, reasonable self talking," she went on more
quietly. "Don't--don't even think about it! In the first place, you
couldn't get it!"

"Oh, yes, I could. Clarence wouldn't contest it," Rachael said. "He'd
agree to anything to be rid of me. If not--if he wouldn't agree to my
filing suit under the New York law, I could establish my residence in
California or Nevada, and bring suit there. ..."

Mrs. Haviland gasped.

"Give up your home and your car and your maids for some small hotel?"
she questioned, with her favorite air of neatly placing her fingertip
upon the weak spot in her opponent's armor. "No clubs, no dinners, none
of your old friends--have you thought of that?"

"You may imagine that I've thought of it from a good many angles,
Florence," Rachael said coldly, finding that what had been a mere
drifting idea was beginning to take rather definite form in her mind.
It was delightful to see the usually complacent and domineering
Florence so agitated and at a loss.

"I never dreamed--" Mrs. Haviland mused dazedly. "How long, in Heaven's
name, have you been thinking about it?"

"Oh, quite some time," said Rachael.

"Well, it's awful!" the other woman said. "It'll make the most
awful--and as if poor Clarence hadn't been all through it all once! I
declare it makes me sick! But I can't believe you're serious. Rachael,
think--think what it means!"

"It's a very serious thing," the other assented placidly. "But Clarence
has no one but himself to blame."

"Only Clarence won't BE blamed, my dear; men never are!" Mrs. Haviland
suggested unkindly. Rachael reddened.

"_I_ don't care what they say or whom they blame!" she answered proudly.

"Ah, well, my dear, we aren't any of us really indifferent to
criticism," the older woman said, watching closely the effect of her
words. "People are censorious--it's too bad, it's a pity--but there you
are. 'There must have been something we didn't understand,' they say,
'there must be another man!'"

Rachael raised her head a little, and managed a smile.

"That's what they say," Mrs. Haviland went on, mildly triumphant. "And
no matter how brave or how independent a woman is, she doesn't like
THAT." There came to the speaker suddenly, under her smooth flow of
words, a sickening shock of realization: it was of Rachael and Clarence
she was speaking, her nearest relatives; it was one of the bulwarks of
her world that was threatened! Without her knowledge her tone became
less sure and more sincere. "For God's sake, think what you are doing,
dear," she said pleadingly; "think of Carol and of us all! Don't drag
us all through the papers again! I know what Clarence is, poor wretched
boy; he's always had too much money, he's always had his own way. I
know what you put up with week in and week out--"

Mrs. Haviland's usual attitude of assured superiority never impressed
her sister-in-law. Her pompous magnificence was a source of unmitigated
amusement to Rachael. But now the older woman's emotion had carried her
on to genuine and honest expression in spite of herself, and listening,
Rachael found herself curiously stirred. She looked down, conscious of
a sudden melting in her heart, a thickening in her throat.

"I've always been so fond of you, Rachael," Florence went on. "I've
always stood your friend--you know that--"

"I know," Rachael said huskily, her lashes dropped.

"Long before I knew how much you would be liked, Rachael, and what a
fuss people were going to make over you, I made you welcome," continued
Florence simply, with tears in her eyes. "I thanked God that Clarence
had married a good woman, and that Carol would have a refined and a--I
may say a Christian home. Isn't that true?"

"I know," Rachael said again with an effort, as she paused.

"Then think it over," besought the other woman eagerly. "Think that
Carol will marry, and that Clarence--" Her ardent tone dropped
suddenly. There was a moment's pause. Then she added dryly, "How do,
dear?"

"How do, Tante Firenze!" said Carol, who had come abruptly into the
room. "How are the girls? Say, listen! Is Isabelle going to the
Bowditches'?"

"I don't even know that Charlotte is going," Mrs. Haviland said, with
an auntly smile of baffling sweetness that yet contained a subtle
reproof. "Uncle Gardner and I haven't made up our minds. Isabelle in
any case would only go to look on, so she is not so much interested,
but poor Charlotte is simply on tenterhooks to know whether it's to be
yes or no. Girls' first parties"--her indulgent smile included
Rachael--"dear me, how important they seem!"

"I should think you'd have to answer Mrs. Bowditch," said Carol in
plain disgust at this maternal vacillation.

"Mrs. Bowditch is fortunately an old enough friend, dear, to waive the
usual formalities," her aunt answered sweetly.

"But, my gracious--Charlotte's two months older than I am, and she
won't know any of the men!" Carol protested.

"Don't speak in that precocious way, Bill," Rachael said sharply. "You
went to your first dances last winter!"

Carol gave her stepmother a look conspicuously devoid of affection, and
turned to adjust her smart little hat with the aid of a narrow mirror
hanging between the glass dining-room doors.

"You couldn't drop me at the club, on your way to church, Tante?" she
presently inquired. And to Rachael she added, with youthful impatience,
"I told Dad where I was going!"

Mrs. Haviland rose somewhat heavily.

"Glad to. Any chance of you coming to lunch, Rachael? What are your
plans?"

"Thank you, no, woman dear! I may go over to Gertrude's for tea."

The little group broke up. Mrs. Haviland and her niece went out to the
waiting motor car purring on the pebbled drive. Rachael idly watched
them out of sight, sighed at the thought of wasting so beautiful a day
indoors, and went slowly upstairs. Her husband, comfortably propped in
pillows, looked better.

"Clarence," said she, depositing several pounds of morning papers upon
the foot of his bed, "who's Billy lunching with at the club?"

Clarence picked up the uppermost paper, fixed his eyes attentively upon
it, and puffed upon his cigarette for reply.

"Do you know?" Rachael asked vigorously.

No answer. Mr. Breckenridge, his eyes still intent upon what he was
reading, held his cigarette at arm's length over the brass bowl on the
table beside the bed, and dislodged a quarter-inch of ash with his
little finger.

Rachael, briskly setting his cluttered table to rights, gave him an
angry glance that, so far as any effect upon him was concerned, was
thrown away.

"Don't be so rude, Clarence," she said, in annoyance. "Billy said you
agreed to her going to the club for golf. Who's she with?"

At last Mr. Breckenridge raised sodden and redshot eyes to his wife's
face, moistening his dark and swollen lips carefully with his tongue
before he spoke. He was a fat-faced man, who, despite evidences of
dissipation, did not look his more than forty years. There was no gray
in his thin, silky hair, and there still lingered an air of youth and
innocence in his round face. This morning he was in a bad temper
because his whole body was still upset from the Friday night dinner and
drinking party, and in his soul he knew that he had cut rather a poor
figure before Billy, and that the little minx had taken instant
advantage of the situation.

"I just want to say this, Rachael," Clarence said, with an icy dignity
only slightly impaired by the lingering influences of drink. "I'm
Billy's father, and I understand her, and she understands me. That's
all that's necessary; do you get me?" He put his cigarette holder back
in his mouth, gripped it firmly between his teeth, and turned again to
his paper. "If some of you damned jealous women who are always running
around trying to make trouble would let her ALONE" he went on sulkily,
"I'd be obliged to you--that's all!"

Rachael settled her ruffles in a big wing-chair with the innocent
expression of a casual caller. She took a book from the reading table,
and fluttered a few pages indifferently.

"Listen, Clancy," said she placatingly. "Florence was just here, and
she says--and I agree--that there is no question that Joe Pickering is
devoted to Bill. Now, I don't say that Billy is equally devoted--"

"Ha! Better not!" said Clarence at white heat, one eye watchful over
the top of the paper.

"But I DO say," pursued Rachael steadily, "that she is with him a good
deal more than she will admit. Yesterday, for instance, when she was
playing tennis with the Parmalees and the Pinckard boy, Kent came up to
the house to get some ginger ale. I happened to be dummy, and I went
out on the terrace. Joe's horse was down near the courts, and Joe and
Billy were sitting there on one of the benches--where the others were I
don't know. When Kent went down with the ginger ale, Joe got on his
horse and went off. Of course it was only for a few minutes, but Billy
didn't say anything about it--"

Her voice, with a tentative question in it, rested in air. Clarence
turned a page with some rustling of paper.

"Then Florence says," Rachael went on after a moment, "that when she
and Gardner stopped here Wednesday night Joe was here, and Vivvie
Sartoris wasn't here. Now, of course, I don't KNOW, for I didn't ask
Alfred---"

"There you go," said the sick man witheringly. "That's right--ask the
maids, and get all the servants talking; all come down on the heels of
a poor little girl like a pack of yapping wolves! I suppose if she was
plain and unattractive--I should think you'd be ashamed," he went on,
changing his high and querulous key to one of almost priestly authority
and reproof, "Upon my word, it's beneath your dignity. My little girl
comes to me, and she explains the whole matter. Pickering admires
her--she can't help that--and she has an influence over him. She tells
me he hasn't touched a thing but beer for six weeks, just because she
asked him to give up heavy drinking. He told her the other day that if
he had met her a few years ago, Lucy never would have left him. She's
wakened the boy up, he's a different fellow--"

"All that may be true," Rachael said quickly, the color that his
preposterous rebuke had summoned to her cheeks still flushing them,
"still, you don't want Billy to marry Joe Pickering! You know that sort
of pity, and that business of reforming a man--" She paused, but
Clarence did not speak. "Not that Billy herself realizes it, I
daresay," Rachael added presently, watching the reader's absorbed face
for an answering look.

Silence.

"Clarence!" she began imperatively.

Clarence withdrew his attention from the paper with an obvious effort,
and spoke in a laboriously polite tone.

"I don't care to discuss it, Rachael."

"But--" Rachael stopped short on the word. Silence reigned in the big,
bright room except for the occasional rustle of Clarence's newspaper.
His wife sat idle, her eyes roving indifferently from the gayly papered
walls to the gayly flowered hangings, the great bowl of daffodils on
the bookcase, the portrait of Carol that, youthful and self-conscious,
looked down from the mantel. On the desk a later photograph of Carol,
in a silver frame, was duly flanked by one of Rachael, the girl in the
gown she had worn for her first big dance, the woman looking out from
under the narrow brim of a snug winter hat, great furs framing her
beautiful face, and her slender figure wrapped in furs. Here also was a
picture of Florence Haviland, her handsome face self-satisfied, her
trio of homely, distinguished-looking girls about her, and a small
picture of Gardner, and two of Clarence's dead mother: one, as they all
remembered her, a prim-looking woman with gray hair and magnificent
lace on her unfashionable gown, the other, taken thirty years before,
showing her as cheerful and youthful, a cascade of ringlets falling
over her shoulder, the arm that coquettishly supported her head resting
upon an upholstered pedestal, a voluminous striped silk gown sweeping
away from her in rich folds. There was even a picture of Clarence and
Florence when they were respectively eight and twelve, Clarence in a
buttoned serge kilt and plaid stockings, his fat, gentle little face
framed in damp careful curls, Florence also with plaid stockings and a
scalloped frock. Clarence sat in a swing; Florence, just behind him,
leaned on an open gate, her legs crossed carelessly as she rested on
her elbows. And there was a picture of their father, a simple-faced man
in an ample beard, taken at that period when photographs were highly
glazed, and raised in bas relief. Least conspicuous of all was a
snapshot framed in a circle of battered blue-enamel daisies, the
picture of a baby girl laughing against a background of dandelions and
meadow grass. And Rachael knew that this was Clarence's greatest
treasure, that it went wherever he went, and that it was worn shabby
and tarnished from his hands and his lips.

Sometimes she looked at it and wondered. What a bright-faced, gay
little thing Billy had been! Who had set her down in that field, and
quieted the rioting eyes and curls and dimples, and anchored the
restless little feet, while Baby watched Dad and the black box with the
birdie in it? Paula? Once, idly interested in those old days before she
had known him, she had asked about the picture. But Clarence, glad to
talk of it, had not mentioned his wife.

"It was before my father died; we were up in the old Maine place," he
had said. "Gosh, Bill was cute that day! We went on a drive--no motor
cars then--and took our lunch, and after lunch the kid comes and
settles herself in my arms--for a nap, if you please! 'Say,
look-a-here,' I said, 'what do you think I am--a Pullman?' I wanted a
smoke, by George! She wasn't two, you know. Her fat little legs were
bare, we'd put her into socks, and her face was flushed, and she just
looked up at me through her hair and said, 'Hing!' Well, it was
good-bye smoke for me! I sang all right, and she cuddled down as
pleased as a kitten, and off she went!"

To-day Rachael's eyes wandered from the picture to Clarence's face. She
tried to study it dispassionately, but, still shaken by their recent
conversation, and sitting there, as she knew she was sitting there,
merely to prove that it had had no effect upon her, she felt this to be
a little difficult.

What sort of a little boy had he been? A fat little boy, of course. She
disliked fat little boys. A spoiled little boy, never crossed in any
way. His mother made him go to Sunday-school, and dancing school, and
to Miss Nesmith's private academy, where he was coaxed and praised and
indulged even more than at home. And old Fanny, who was still with
Florence, superintended his baths and took care of his clothes, and ran
her finger over the bristles of his toothbrush every morning, to see if
he had told her the truth. He rarely did; they used to laugh about
those old deceptions. Clarence used to laugh as violently as the old
woman when she accused him of occasional kicking and biting.

Other boys came in to play with him. Was it because of his magic
lantern and his velocipede, his unending supply of cream puffs and
licorice sticks, or because they liked him? Rachael knew only a detail
here and there: that he had danced a fancy dance with Anna Vanderwall
when he was a fat sixteen, at a Kermess, and that he had given a stag
dinner to twenty youths of his own age a few days before he went off to
college, and that they had drunk a hundred and fifty dollars' worth of
champagne. She knew that his allowance at college was three hundred
dollars a month, and that he never stayed within it, and it was old
Fanny's boast that every stitch the boy ever wore from the day he was
born came from London or Paris. His underwear was as dainty as a
bride's; he had his first dress suit at fifteen; at college he had his
suite of three big rooms furnished like showrooms, his monogrammed
cigarettes, his boat, and his horse.

The thought of all these things used to distress his mother when she
was old and much alone. She attempted to belittle the luxury of
Clarence's boyhood. She told Rachael that he was treated just as the
other boys were. Her conscience was never quite easy about his
upbringing.

"You can't hold a boy too tight, you know, or else he'll break away
altogether," old lady Breckenridge would say to Rachael, sitting before
a coal fire in the gloomy magnificence of her old-fashioned drawingroom
and pressing the white fingers of one hand against the agonized joints
of the other. "I was often severe with Clarence, and he was a good boy
until he got with other boys; he was always loving to me. He never
should have married Paula Verlaine," she would add fretfully. "A good
woman would have overlooked his faults and made a fine man of him, but
she was always an empty-headed little thing! Ah, well"--and the poor
old woman would sigh as she drew her fluffy shawl about her
shoulders--"I cannot blame myself, that's my great consolation now,
Rachael, when I think of facing my Master and rendering an account. I
have been heavily afflicted, but I am not the first God-fearing woman
who has been visited with sorrow through her children!"

Clarence had visited his mother often in the weeks that preceded her
death, but she did not take much heed of his somewhat embarrassed
presence, nor, to Rachael's surprise, did her last hours contain any of
those heroic joys that are supposedly the reward of long suffering and
virtue. An unexpressed terror seemed to linger in her sickroom, indeed
to pervade the whole house; the invalid lay staring drearily at the
heavy furnishings of her immense dark room, a nurse slipped in and out;
the bloody light of the westering sun, falling through stairway windows
of colored glass, blazed in the great hallway all through the chilly
October afternoons. Callers came and went, there were subdued voices
and soft footsteps; flowers came, their wet fragrance breaking from
oiled paper and soaked cardboard boxes, the cards that were wired to
them resisting all attempts at detachment. Clergymen came, and Rachael
imitated their manner afterward, to the general delight.

On the day before she died Mrs. Breckenridge caught her son's plump
cool hand in her own hot one, and made him promise to stop drinking,
and to go to church, and to have Carol confirmed. Clarence promised
everything.

But he did not keep his promises. Rachael had not thought he would;
perhaps the old lady herself had not thought he would. He was sobered
at the funeral, but not sober. Six weeks later all the bills against
the estate were in. Florence had some of the family jewels and the
family silver, Rachael had some, some was put away for Billy; the
furniture was sold, the house rented for a men's club, and a
nondescript man, calling upon young Mrs. Breckenridge, notified her
that the stone had been set in place as ordered. They never saw it;
they paid a small sum annually for keeping the plot in order, and the
episode of Ada Martin Langhorne Breckenridge's life was over.

Clarence drank so heavily after that, and squandered his magnificent
heritage so recklessly, that people began to say that he would soon
follow his mother. But that was four years ago, and Rachael looking
dispassionately at him, where he lay dozing in his pillows, had to
admit that he had shown no change in the past four--or eight, or
twelve--years. Like many a better woman, and many a better wife, she
wondered if she would outlive him, vaguely saw herself, correct and
remote, in her new black.

Involuntarily she sighed. How free she would be! She wished Clarence no
ill, but the fact remained that, loose as was the bond between them, it
galled and checked them both at every step. Their conversations were
embittered by a thousand personalities, they instinctively knew how to
hurt each other; a look from Clarence could crush his poised and
accomplished wife into a mere sullen shrew, and she knew that it took
less than a look from her--it took the mere existence of her youth and
health and freshness--to infuriate him sometimes. At best, their
relationship consciously avoided hostility. Rachael was silent, fuming;
Clarence fumed and was silent; they sank to light monosyllables; they
parted as quickly as possible. Would Clarence like to dine with this
friend or that? Rachael didn't think he would, but might as well ask
him. No, thank you! he wouldn't be found dead in that bunch. Did
Rachael want to go with the Smiths and the Joneses to dine at the
Highway, and dance afterward? Oh, horrors! no, thank you!

It was only when she spoke of Billy that Rachael was sure of his
interest and attention, and of late she perforce had for Billy only
criticism and disapproval. Rachael read the girl's vain and shallow and
pleasure-loving little heart far more truly than her father could, and
she was conscious of a genuine fear lest Billy bring sorrow to them
all. Society was indulgent, yes, but an insolent and undeveloped little
girl like Billy could not snap her fingers at the law without suffering
the full penalty. Rachael would suffer, too. Florence and her girls
would suffer, and Clarence--well, Clarence would not bear it. "What an
awful mix-up it is!" Rachael thought wearily. "And what a sickening,
tiresome place this world is!"

And then suddenly the thought of Warren Gregory came back, and the new
curious sensation of warmth tugged at her heart.




CHAPTER IV


Mrs. Gardner Haviland, whirling home in her big car, after church, was
hardly more pleased with life than was her beautiful sister-in-law,
although she was not quite as conscious of dissatisfaction as was
Rachael. Her position as a successful mother, wife, housekeeper, and
member of society was theoretically so perfect that she derived from
it, necessarily, an enormous amount of theoretical satisfaction. She
could find no fault with herself or her environment; she was pleasantly
ready with advice or with an opinion or with a verdict in every
contingency that might arise in human affairs, as a Christian woman of
unimpeachable moral standing. She knew her value in a hectic and
reckless world. She did not approve of women smoking, or of suffrage,
but she played a brilliant game of bridge, and did not object to an
infinitesimal stake. She belonged to clubs and to their directorates,
yet it was her boast that she knew every thought in her children's
hearts, and the personal lives and hopes and ambitions of her maids
were as an open book to her.

Still, she had her moments of weakness, and on this warm day of the
spring she felt vaguely disappointed with life. Rachael's hints of
divorce had filled her with a real apprehension; she felt a good aunt's
concern at Billy's reckless course, and a good sister's disapproval of
Clarence and his besetting sin.

But it was not these considerations that darkened her full handsome
face as she went up the steps of her big, widespread country mansion;
it was some vaguer, more subtle discontent. She had not dressed herself
for the sudden warmth of the day, and her heavy flowered hat and trim
veil had given her a headache. The blazing sunlight on white steps and
blooming flowers blinded her, and when she stepped into the dark, cool
hall she could hardly see.

The three girls were there, well-bred, homely girls, in their simple
linens: Charlotte, a rather severe type, eyeglassed at eighteen, her
thick, light-brown hair plainly brushed off her face and knotted on her
neck, was obviously the opposite of everything Billy was;
conscientious, intellectual, and conscious of her own righteousness,
she could not compete with her cousin in Billy's field; she very
sensibly made the best of her own field. Isabelle was a stout, clumsy
girl of sixteen, with a metal bar across her large white teeth, red
hair, and a creamy skin. Little Florence was only nine, a thin,
freckled, sensitive child, with a shy, unsmiling passion for dogs and
horses, and little in common with the rest of the world.

Their mother had expected sons in every case, and still felt a little
baffled by the fact of her children's sex. Charlotte proving a girl,
she had said gallantly that she must have a little brother "to play
with Charlotte." Isabelle, duly arriving, probably played with
Charlotte much more amiably than a brother would have done, and Mrs.
Haviland blandly accepted her existence, but in her heart she was far
from feeling satisfied. She was, of course, an absolutely competent
mother to girls, but she felt that she would have been a more capable
and wonderful mother to boys.

More than six years after Isabelle's birth Florence Haviland began to
talk smilingly of "my boy." "Gardner worships the girls," she said,
with wifely indulgence, "but I know he wants a son--and the girlies
need a brother!" A resigned shrug ended the sentence with: "So I'm in
for the whole thing again!"

It was said that Mrs. Haviland greeted the news that the third child
was a daughter with a mechanically bright smile, as one puzzled beyond
all words by perverse event, and that her spoken comment was the single
mild ejaculation: "Extraordinary!"

Now the two older Haviland girls, following their mother into her
bedroom, seated themselves there while she changed her dress. Florence
junior, in passionate argument with the butler over the death of one of
the drawing-room goldfish, remained downstairs. Mrs. Haviland, casting
the hot, high-collared silk upon the bed, took a new embroidered pongee
from a box, and busied herself with its unfamiliar hooks and straps.
Charlotte and Isabelle were never quite spontaneous in their
conversations with their mother, their attitude in talking with her
being one of alert and cautious self-consciousness; they did not
breathe quite naturally, and they laughed constantly. Yet they both
loved this big, firm, omnipotent being, and believed in her utterly and
completely.

"We met Doctor Gregory and Charlie near the club this morning, M'ma,"
volunteered Isabelle.

"And they asked about Mrs. Bowditch's dance," Charlotte added with a
little innocent craft. "But I said that M'ma had been unable to decide.
Of course I said that we would LIKE to go, and that you knew that, and
would allow it if you possibly could."

"That was quite right, dear," Mrs. Haviland said to her oldest
daughter, calmly ignoring the implied question, and to Isabelle she
added kindly: "M'ma doesn't quite like to hear you calling a young man
you hardly know by his first name, Isabelle. Of course, there's no harm
in it, but it cheapens a girl just a LITTLE. While Charlotte might do
it because she is older, and has seen Charlie Gregory at some of the
little informal affairs last winter, you are younger, and haven't
really seen much of him since he went to college. Don't let M'ma hear
you do that again."

Isabelle turned a lively scarlet, and even Charlotte colored and was
silent. The younger girl's shamed eyes met her mother's, and she nodded
in quick embarrassment. But this tacit consent did not satisfy Mrs.
Haviland.

"You understand M'ma, don't you, dear?" she asked. Isabelle murmured
something indistinguishable.

"Yes, M'ma!" said that lady herself, encouragingly and briskly.
Isabelle duly echoed a husky "Yes, M'ma!"

"Did you give my message to Miss Roper, Charlotte?" pursued the matron.

"She wasn't at church, M'ma," said Charlotte, taken unawares and
instinctively uneasy. "Mrs. Roper said she had a heavy cold; she said
she'd been sleeping on the sleeping porch."

"So M'ma's message was forgotten?" the mother asked pleasantly.

Charlotte perceived herself to be in an extremely dangerous position.
Long ago both girls had lost, under this close surveillance and skilful
system of cross-examination, their original regard for truth as truth.
That they usually said what was true was because policy and
self-protection suggested it. Charlotte had time now for a flying
survey of the situation and its possibilities before she answered,
somewhat uncertainly:

"I asked Mrs. Roper to deliver it, M'ma. Wasn't that--" Her voice
faltered nervously. "Was it something you would have rather telephoned
about?"

"Would rather have telephoned about?" Mrs. Haviland corrected
automatically. "Well, M'ma would rather FEEL that when she sends a
message it is given to JUST the person to whom she sent it, in JUST the
way she sent it. However, in this case no harm was done. Don't hook
your heel over the rung of your chair, dear! Ring the bell, Isabelle, I
want Alice."

"I'll hook you, M'ma!" volunteered Charlotte.

"Thank you, dear, but I want to speak to Alice. And now you girls might
run along. I'll be down directly."

A moment later she submitted herself patiently to the maid's hands.
Florence was a conscientious woman, and she felt that she owed Alice as
well as herself this little office. Charlotte might have hooked her
gown for her; indeed, she might with a small effort have done it
herself, but it was Alice's duty, and nothing could be worse for Alice,
or any servant, than to have her duties erratically assumed by others
on one day and left to her on the next. This was the quickest way to
spoil servants, and Florence never spoiled her servants.

"They have a pleasant day for their picnic," she observed now, kindly.
Alice was on her knees, her face puckered as she busied herself with
the hooks of a girdle, but she smiled gratefully. Her two brothers had
borrowed their employer's coal barge to-day, and with a score of
cherished associates, several hundred sandwiches, sardines,
camp-chairs, and bottles of root beer, with a smaller number of
chaperoning mothers and concertinas, and the inevitable baby or two,
were making a day of it on the river. Alice had timidly asked, a few
days before, for a holiday to-day, that she might join them, but Mrs.
Haviland had pointed out to her reasonably that she, Alice, had been at
home, unexpectedly, because of her mother's illness, not only the
previous Sunday, but the Saturday, too, and had got half-a-day's leave
of absence for her cousin's wedding only the week before that. Alice
was only eighteen, and her little spurt of bravery had been entirely
exhausted long before her mistress's pleasant voice had stopped.
Nothing more was said of the excursion until to-day.

"I guess they'll be eating their lunch, now, at Old Dock Point," said
Alice, rising from her knees.

"Well, I hope they'll be careful; one hears of so many accidents among
foolish young people there!" Mrs. Haviland answered, going downstairs
to join her daughters in the hall, and, surrounded by them, proceeding
to her own lunch.

For a while she was thoughtfully silent, and the conversation was
maintained between the older girls and their governess. Charlotte and
Isabelle chatted both German and French charmingly. Little Florence
presently began to talk of her goldfish, meanwhile cutting a channel
across her timbale through which the gravy ran in a stream.

Usually their mother listened to them with a quiet smile; they were
well-educated girls, and any mother's heart must have been proud of
them. But to-day she felt herself singularly dissatisfied with them.
She said to herself that she hated Sundays, of all the days of the
week. Other days had their duties: music, studies, riding, tennis, or
walks, but on Sundays the girls were a dead weight upon her. Somehow,
they were not in the current of good times that the other girls and
boys of their ages were having. If she suggested brightly that they go
over to the Parmalees' or the Morans' and see if the young people were
playing tennis, she knew that Charlotte would delicately negative the
idea: "They've got their sets all made up, M'ma, and one hates to,
unless they specially ask one, don't you know?" They might go, of
course, and greet their friends decorously, and watch the game
smilingly for a while. Then they would come home with Fraulein, not
forgetting to say good-bye to their hostess. But, although Charlotte
played a better game than many of the other girls, and Isabelle played
a good game, too, there were always gay little creatures in dashing
costumes who monopolized the courts and the young men, and made the
Haviland girls feel hopelessly heavy and dull. They would come home and
tell their mother that Vivian Sartoris let two of the boys jump her
over the net, and that Cousin Carol wore Kent Parmalee's panama all
afternoon, and called out to him, right across the court, "Come on down
to the boathouse, Kent, and let's have a smoke!"

"Poor Vivian--poor Billy!" Mrs. Haviland would say. "Men don't really
admire girls who allow them such familiarities, although the silly
girls may think they do! But when it comes to marrying, it is the
sweet, womanly girls to whom the men turn!"

She did not believe this herself, nor did the girls believe it, but, if
they discussed it when they were alone together, before Mamma, they
were always decorously impressed.

"Any plans for the afternoon, girlies?" she asked now, when the forced
strawberries were on the table, and little Florence was trying to eat
the nuts out of her cake, and at the same time carefully avoid the cake
itself and the frosting.

"What's Carol doing, M'ma?"

"When M'ma asks you a question, Isabelle, do not answer with another
question, dear. I dropped Carol at the club, but I think Aunt Rachael
means to pick her up there later, and go on to Mrs. Whittaker's for
tea."

"We met Mrs. Whittaker in the Exchange yesterday, M'ma, and she very
sweetly said that you were to--that is, that she hoped you would bring
us in for a little while this afternoon. Didn't she, Isabelle?"

"I don't want to go!" Isabelle grumbled. But her mother ignored her.

"That was very sweet of Aunt Gertrude. I think I will go over to the
club and see what Papa is planning and how his game is going, and then
I could pick you girls up here."

"I'm going over to play with Georgie and Robbie Royce!" shrilled
Florence. "They're mean to me, but I don't care! I hit George in the
stomach---"

Mrs. Haviland looked as pained as if the reported blow had fallen upon
her own person, but she was strangely indulgent to her youngest born,
and now did no more than signal to the nurse, old Fanny, who stood
grinning behind the child's chair, that Miss Florence might be excused.
Florence was accordingly borne off, and the girls drifted idly
upstairs, Isabelle confiding to her sister as she dutifully brushed her
teeth that she wished "something" would happen! Alice muttered to
Sally, another maid, over her strong hot tea, that you might as well be
dead as never do a thing in God's world you wanted to do, but the rest
of the large staff enjoyed a hearty meal, and when Percival brought the
car around at three o'clock, Mrs. Haviland, magnificent in a change of
costume, spent the entire trip to the club in the resentful reflection
that the man had obviously had coffee and cream and mutton for his
lunch--disgusting of him to come straight to his car and his mistress
still redolent of his meal, but what could one do? In Mrs. Haviland's
upper rear hall was a framed and typewritten list of rules for the
maids, conspicuous upon which were those for daily baths and regular
use of toothbrushes. But Percival never had seen this list, and he was
a wonderful driver and a special favorite with her husband. She decided
that there was nothing to be done, unless of course the thing recurred,
although the moment's talk with Percival haunted and distressed her all
day.

She duly returned to the house for her daughters a little after four
o'clock, and in amicable conversation they went together to the tea, a
crowded, informal affair, in another large house full of rugs and
flowers, rooms dark and rich with expensive tapestries and mahogany,
rooms bright and gay with white enamel and chintz and wicker furniture.

Everybody was here. Jeanette and Phyllis, as well as Elinor Vanderwall,
Peter Pomeroy and George, the Buckneys and Parker Hoyt, the Emorys, the
Chases, Mrs. Sartoris and old Mrs. Torrence and Jack, all jumbled a
greeting to the Havilands. Of Carol they presently caught a glimpse
standing on a sheltered little porch with Joe Pickering's sleek head
beside her. They were apparently not talking, just staring quietly down
at the green terraces of the garden. Rachael was pouring tea, her face
radiant under a narrowbrimmed, close hat loaded with cherries, her gown
of narrow green and white stripes the target for every pair of female
eyes in the room.

Charlotte Haviland, in her mother's wake, chanced to encounter Kenneth
Moran, a red-faced, well-dressed and blushing youth of her own age. Her
complacent mother was witness to the blameless conversation between
them.

"How do you do, Kenneth? I didn't know you were here!"

"Oh, how do you do, Charlotte? How do you do, Isabelle? I didn't know
you were here!"

Isabelle grinned silently in horrible embarrassment but Charlotte said,
quick-wittedly:

"How is your mother, Kenneth, and Dorothy?"

"She's well--they're well, thank you. They're here somewhere--at least
Mother is. I think Dorothy's still over at the Clays', playing tennis!"

He laughed violently at this admission, and Charlotte laughed, too.

"It's lovely weather for tennis," she said encouragingly. "We--"

"You--" Mr. Moran began. "I beg your pardon!"

"No, I interrupted you!"

"No, that was my fault. I was only going to say that we ought to have a
game some morning. Going to have your courts in order this year?"

"Yes, indeed," Charlotte said, with what was great vivacity for her.
"Papa has had them all rolled; some men came down from town--we had it
all sodded, you know, last year."

"Is that right?" asked Mr. Moran, as one deeply impressed. "We must go
to it--what?"

"We must!" Charlotte said happily. "Any morning, Kenneth!"

"Sure, I'll telephone!" agreed the youth enthusiastically. "I'm trying
to find Kent Parmalee; his aunt wants him!" he added mumblingly, as he
began to vaguely shoulder his way through the crowd again.

"You'd better take a microscope!" said Charlotte wittily. And Mr.
Moran's burst of laughter and his "That's right, too!" came back to
them as he went away.

"Dear fellow!" Mrs. Haviland said warmly.

"Isn't he nice!" Charlotte said, fluttered and glowing. She hoped in
her heart that she would meet him again, but although the Havilands
stayed until nearly six o'clock they did not do so; perhaps because
shortly after this conversation Kenneth Moran met Miss Vivian Sartoris,
and they took a plateful of rich, crushy little cakes and went and sat
under the stairs, where they took alternate bites of each other's mocha
and chocolate confections, and where Vivian told Kenneth all about a
complicated and thrilling love affair between herself and one of the
popular actors of the day. This narrative reflected more credit upon
the young woman's imagination than upon her charms had the listener but
suspected it, but Kenneth was not a brilliant boy, and they had a
lovely time over their confidences.

Charlotte's romantic encounter with the gentleman, however, made her
happy for several hours, and colored her cheeks rosily.

"You're getting pretty, Carlotta!" said her Aunt Rachael, observing
this. "Don't drink tea, that's a good child! You can stuff on cakes and
chocolate of course, Isabelle," she added, "but Charlotte's complexion
ought to be her FIRST THOUGHT for the next five years!"

"I don't really want any," asserted Charlotte, feeling wonderfully
grown-up and superior to the claims of a nursery appetite. "But can't I
help you, Aunt Rachael?"

"No, my dear, you can't! I'm through the worst of it, and being bored
slowly but firmly to death! Gertrude, I'm just saying that your party
bores me."

"So sorry about you, Rachael!" said the slim, laceclad hostess calmly.
"Here's Judy Moran! Nearly six, Judy, and we dine at seven on Sundays.
But never mind, eat and drink your fill, my child."

"Billy's flirtin' her head off out there!" wheezed stout Mrs. Moran,
dropping into a chair. "Joe and Kent and young Gregory and half a dozen
others are out there with her."

Mrs. Breckenridge, who had begun to frown, relaxed in her chair.

"Ah, well, there's safety in numbers!" she said, reassured. "You take
cream, Judy, and two lumps? Give Mrs. Moran some of those little damp,
brown sandwiches, Isabelle. A minute ago she had some of the most
heavenly hot toast here, but she's taken it away again! I wish I could
get some tea myself, but I've tried three times and I can't!"

She busied herself resignedly with tongs and teapot, and as Mrs. Moran
bit into her first sandwiches, and the Haviland girls moved away at a
word from their mother, Rachael raised her eyes and met Warren
Gregory's look.

He was standing, ten feet away, in a doorway, his eyelids half dropped
over amused eyes, his hands sunk in his coat pockets. Rachael knew that
he had been there for some moments, and her heart struggled and
fluttered like a bird in a snare, and with a thrill as girlish as
Charlotte's own she felt the color rise in her cheeks.

"Come have some tea, Greg," she said, indicating the empty chair beside
her.

"Thank you, dear," he answered, his head close to hers for a moment as
he sat down. The little word set Rachael's heart to hammering again.
She glanced quickly to see if Mrs. Moran had overheard, but that lady
had at last caught sight of the maid with the hot toast, and her ample
back was turned toward the teatable.

Indeed, in the noisy, disordered room, which was beginning to be
deserted by straggling groups of guests, they were quite unobserved. To
both it was a delicious moment, this little domestic interlude of tea
and talk in the curved window of the dining-room, lighted by the last
light of a spring day, and sweet with the scent of wilting spring
flowers.

"You make my heart behave in a manner not to be described in words!"
said Rachael, her fingers touching his as she handed him his tea.

"It must be mine you feel," suggested Warren Gregory; "you haven't
one--by all accounts!"

"I thought I hadn't, Greg, but, upon my word---" She puckered her lips
and raised her eyebrows whimsically, and gave her head a little shake.
Doctor Gregory gave her a shrewdly appraising look, sighed, and stirred
his tea.

"If ever you discover yourself to be the possessor of such an organ,
Rachael," said he dispassionately, "you won't joke about it over a
tea-table! You'll wake up, my friend; we'll see something besides
laughter in those eyes of yours, and hear something besides cool reason
in your voice! I may not be the man to do it, but some man will, some
day, and--when John Gilpin rides--"

The eyes to which he referred had been fixed in serene confidence upon
his as he began to speak. But a second later Rachael dropped them, and
they rested upon her own slender hand, lying idle upon the teatable,
with its plain gold ring guarded by a dozen blazing stones. Had he
really stirred her, Warren Gregory wondered, as he watched the
thoughtful face under the bright, cherry-loaded hat.

"You know how often there is neither cool reason nor any cause for
laughter in my life, Greg," she said, after a moment. "As for love--I
don't think I know what love is! I am an absolutely calculating woman,
and my first, last, and only view of anything is just how much it
affects me and my comfort."

"I don't believe it!" said the doctor.

"It's true. And why shouldn't it be?" Rachael gave him a grave smile.
"No one," said she seriously, "ever--ever--EVER suggested to me that
there was anything amiss in that point of view! Why is there?"

"I don't understand you," said the doctor simply.

"One doesn't often talk this way, I suppose," she said slowly. "But
there is a funny streak of--what shall I call it?--conscience, or soul,
or whatever you like, in me. Whether I get it from my mother's Irish
father or my father's clergyman grandfather, I don't know, but I'm
eternally defending myself. I have long sessions with myself, when I'm
judge and jury, and invariably I find 'Not Guilty!'"

"Not guilty of what?" the man asked, stirring his untasted cup.

"Not guilty of anything!" she answered, with a child's puzzled laugh.
"I stick to my bond, I dress and talk and eat and go about--" Her voice
dropped; she stared absently at the table.

"But--" the doctor prompted.

"But--that's just it--but I'm so UNHAPPY all the time!" Rachael
confessed. "We all seem like a lot of puppets, to me--like Bander-log!
What are we all going round and round in circles for, and who gets any
fun out of it? What's YOUR answer, Greg--what makes the wheels go
round?"

"'Tis love--'tis love--that makes--etcetera, etcetera," supplied the
doctor, his tone less flippant than his words.

"Oh--love!" Rachael's voice was full of delicate scorn. "I've seen a
great deal of all sorts and kinds of love," she went on, "and I must
say that I consider love a very much overrated article! You're laughing
at me, you bold gossoon, but I mean it. Clarence loved Paula madly,
kidnapped her from a boarding-school and all that, but I don't know how
much THEIR seven years together helped the world go round. He never
loved me, never once said he did, but I've made him a better wife than
she did. He loves Bill, now, and it's the worst thing in the world for
her!"

"THERE'S some love for you," said Doctor Gregory, glancing across the
room to the figures of Miss Leila Buckney and Mr. Parker Hoyt, who were
laughing over a cabinet full of ivories.

"I wonder just what would happen there if Parker lost his money
to-morrow--if Aunt Frothy died and left it all to Magsie Clay?" Rachael
suggested, smiling.

The doctor answered only with a shrug.

"More than that," pursued Rachael, "suppose that Parker woke up
to-morrow morning and found his engagement was all a dream, found that
he really hadn't asked Leila to marry him, and that he was as free as
air. Do you suppose that the minute he'd had his breakfast he would go
straight over to Leila's house and make his dream a heavenly reality?
Or would he decide that there was no hurry about it, and that he might
as well rather keep away from the Buckney house until he'd made up his
mind?"

"I suppose he might convince himself that an hour or two's delay
wouldn't matter!" said the doctor, laughing.

"If you talk to me of clothes, or of jewelry, or of what one ought to
send a bride, and what to say in a letter of condolence, I know where I
am," said Rachael, "but love, I freely confess, is something else
again!"

"I suppose my mother has known great love," said the man, after a
pause. "She spends her days in that quiet old house dreaming about my
father, and my brothers, looking at their pictures, and reading their
letters--"

"But, Greg, she's so unhappy!" Rachael objected briskly. "And
love--surely the contention is that love ought to make one happy?"

"Well, I think her memories DO make her happy, in a way. Although my
mother is really too conscientious a woman to be happy, she worries
about events that are dead issues these twenty years. She wonders if my
brother George might have been saved if she had noticed his cough
before she did; there was a child who died at birth, and then there are
all the memories of my father's death--the time he wanted ice water and
the doctors forbade it, and he looked at her reproachfully. Poor
Mother!"

"You're a joy to her anyway, Greg," Rachael said, as he paused.

"Charley is," he conceded thoughtfully, "and in a way I know I am! But
not in every way, of course," Warren Gregory smiled a little ruefully.

"So the case for love is far from proved," Rachael summarized
cheerfully. "There's no such thing!"

"On the contrary, there isn't anything else, REALLY, in the world,"
smiled the man. "I've seen it shining here and there; we get away from
it here, somewhat, I'll admit"--his glance and gesture indicated the
other occupants of the room--"and, like you, I don't quite know where
we miss it, and what it's all about, but there have been cases in our
wards, for instance: girls whose husbands have been brought in all
smashed up--"

"Girls who saw themselves worried about rent and bread and butter!"
suggested Rachael in delicate irony.

"No, I don't think so. And mothers--mothers hanging over sick
children--"

The women nodded quickly.

"Yes, I know, Greg. There's something very appealing about a sick
kiddie. Bill was ill once, just after we were married, such a little
thing she looked, with her hair all cut! And that DID--now that I
remember it--it really did bring Clarence and me tremendously close.
We'd sit and wait for news, and slip out for little meals, and I'd make
him coffee late at night. I remember thinking then that I never wanted
a child, to make me suffer as we suffered then!"

"Mother love, then, we concede," Doctor Gregory said, smiling.

"Well, yes, I suppose so. Some mothers. I don't believe a mother like
Florence ever was really made to suffer through loving. However, there
IS mother love!"

"And married love."

"No, there I don't agree. While the novelty lasts, while the passion
lasts--not more than a year or two. Then there's just civility--opening
the city house, opening the country house, entertaining, going about,
liking some things about each other, loathing others, keeping off the
dangerous places until the crash comes, or, perhaps, for some lucky
ones, doesn't come!"

"What a mushy little sentimentalist you are, Rachael!" Gregory said
with a rather uncomfortable laugh. "You're too dear and sweet to talk
that way! It's too bad--it's too bad to have you feel so! I wish that I
could carry you away from all these people here--just for a while! I'd
like to prescribe that sea beach you spoke about last night! Wouldn't
we love our desert island! Would you help me build a thatched hut, and
a mud oven, and string shells in your hair, and swim way out in the
green breakers with me?"

"And what makes you think that there would be some saving element in
our relationship?" Rachael asked in a low voice. "What makes you think
that our love would survive the--the dry-rot of life? People would send
us silver and rugs, and there would be a lot of engraving, and barrels
of champagne, and newspaper men trying to cross-examine the maids, and
caterers all over the place, but a few years later, wouldn't it be the
same old story? You talk of a desert island, and swimming, and seaweed,
Greg! But my ideas of a desert island isn't Palm Beach with commercial
photographers snapping at whoever sits down in the sand! Look about us,
Greg--who's happy? Who isn't watching the future for just this or just
that to happen before she can really feel content? Young girls all want
to be older and more experienced, older girls want to be young; this
one is waiting for the new house to be ready, that one--like
Florence--is worrying a little for fear the girls won't quite make a
hit! Clarence worries about Billy, I worry about Clarence--"

"I worry about you!" said Doctor Gregory as she paused.

"Of course you do, bless your heart!" Rachael laughed. "So here we are,
the rich and fashionable and fortunate people of the world, having a
cloudless good time!"

"You know, it's a shame to eat this way--ruin our dinners!" said Mrs.
Moran, suddenly entering the conversation. "Stop flirting with Greg,
Rachael, and give me some more tea. One lump, and only about half a
cup, dear. Tell me a good way to get thin, Greg! Agnes Chase says her
doctor has a diet--you eat all you want, and you get thin. Agnes says
Lou has a friend who has taken off forty-eight pounds. Do you believe
it, Greg? I'm too fat, you know--"

"You carry it well, Judy," said Rachael, still a little shaken by the
abruptly closed conversation, as the doctor, with a conscious thrill,
perceived.

"Thank you, my dear, that's what they all say. But I'd just as soon
somebody else should carry it for awhile!"

"Listen, Rachael," said their hostess, coming up suddenly, and speaking
quickly and lightly, "Clarence is here. Where in the name of everything
sensible is Billy?"

"Clarence!" said Rachael, uncomfortable premonition clutching at her
heart.

"Yes; you come and talk to him, Rachael," Mrs. Whittaker said, in the
same quick undertone. "He's all right, of course, but he's just a
little fussy--"

"Oh, if he wouldn't DO these things!" Rachael said apprehensively as
she rose. "I left him all comfortable--Joe Butler was coming in to see
him! It does EXASPERATE me so! However!"

"Of course it does, but we all know Clarence!" Mrs. Whittaker said
soothingly. "He seems to have got it into his head that Billy--You go
talk to him, Rachael, and I'll send her in."

"Billy's doing no harm! What did he say?" Rachael asked impatiently.

"Oh, nothing definite, of course. But as soon as I said that Billy was
here--he'd asked if she was--he said, 'Then I suppose Mr. Pickering is
here, too!'"

"He's the one person in the world afraid of talk about Billy, yet if he
starts it, he can blame no one but himself!" Rachael said, as she
turned toward the adjoining room. An unexpected ordeal like this always
annoyed her. She was equal to it, of course; she could smooth
Clarence's ruffled feelings, keep a serene front to the world, and get
her family safely home before the storm; she had done it many times
before. But it was so unnecessary! It was so unnecessary to exhibit the
Breckenridge weaknesses before the observant Emorys, before that
unconscionable old gossip Peter Pomeroy, and to the cool, pitying gaze
of all her world!

She found Clarence the centre of a small group in the long
drawing-room. He and Frank Whittaker were drinking cocktails; the
others--Jeanette Vanderwall, Vera Villalonga, a flushed, excitable
woman older than Rachael, and Jimmy and Estelle Hoyt--had refused the
drink, but were adding much noise and laughter to the newcomer's
welcome.

"Hello, Clarence" Rachael said, appraising the situation rapidly as she
came up. "I would have waited for you if I had thought you would come!"

"I just--just thought I would--look in," Clarence said slowly but
steadily. "Didn't want to miss anything. You all seem to be
having--having a pretty good time!"

"It's been a lovely tea," Rachael assured him enthusiastically. "But
I'm just going. Billy's out here on the porch with a bunch of
youngsters; I was just going after her. Don't let Frank give you any
more of that stuff, Clancy. Stop it, Frank! It always gives him a
splitting headache!"

The tone was irreproachably casual and cheerful, but Clarence scowled
at his wife significantly. His dignity, as he answered, was tremendous.

"I can judge pretty well of what hurts me and what doesn't, thank you,
Rachael," he said coldly, with a look ominous with warning.

"That's just what you can't, dear," Mrs. Whittaker, who had joined the
group, said pleasantly. "Take that stuff away, Frank, and don't be so
silly! If Frank," she added to the group, "hadn't been at it all
afternoon himself he wouldn't be such an idiot."

"Greg says he'll take us home, Clarence," Rachael said, in a
matter-of-fact tone. "It's a shame to carry you off when you've just
got here, but I'm going."

"Where's Billy?" Clarence asked stubbornly.

"Right here!" his wife answered reassuringly. And to her great relief
Billy substantiated the statement by coming up to them, a little
uneasy, as her stepmother was, over her father's appearance, yet
confident that there was no real cause for a scene. To get him home as
fast as possible, and let the trouble, whatever it might be, break
there, was the thought in both their minds.

"Had enough tea, Monkey?" said Rachael pleasantly, aware of her
husband's sulphurous gaze, but carefully ignoring it. "Then say day-day
to Aunt Gertrude!"

"If Greg takes you home, send Alfred back with the runabout for me,"
Billy suggested.

"So that you can stay a little longer, eh?" said Clarence, in so ugly a
tone and with so leering a look for his daughter that Rachael's heart
for a moment failed her. "That's a very nice little plan, my dear, but,
as it happens, I came over in the runabout! I'm a fool, you know," said
Clarence sullenly. "I can be hoodwinked and deceived and made a fool
of--oh, sure! But there's a limit! There's a limit," he said in stupid
anger to his wife. "And if I say that I don't like certain friendships
for my daughter, it means that _I_ DON'T LIKE CERTAIN FRIENDSHIPS FOR
MY DAUGHTER, do you get me? That's clear enough, isn't it, Gertrude?"

"It's perfectly clear that you're acting like an idiot, Clancy," Mrs.
Whittaker said briskly. "Nobody's trying to hoodwink you; it isn't
being done this year! You've got an awful katzenjammer from the Stokes'
dinner, and all you men ought to be horsewhipped for letting yourselves
in for such a party. Now if you and Rachael want to go home in the
runabout, I'll send Billy straight after you with Kenneth or Kent--"

"I'll take Billy home," Clarence said heavily.

By this time Rachael was so exquisitely conscious of watching eyes and
listening ears, so agonized over the realization that the fuss Clarence
Breckenridge made at the Whittakers' over Joe Pickering would be handed
down, a precious tradition, over every tea and dinner table for weeks
to come, so miserably aware that a dozen persons, at least, among the
audience were finding in this scene welcome confirmation of all the
odds and ends of gossip that were floating about concerning Billy, that
she would have consented blindly to any arrangement that might
terminate the episode.

It was not the first time that Clarence had made himself ridiculous and
his family conspicuous when not quite himself. At almost every tea
party and at every dance and dinner at least one of the guests
similarly distinguished himself. Rachael knew that there would be no
blame in her friends' minds, but she hated their laughter.

"Do that, then," she agreed quickly. "Greg, will bring me!"

"By George," said Clarence darkly to his hostess, "I'd be a long time
doing that to you, Gertrude! If you had a daughter--"

"My dear Clarence, your daughter is old enough to know her own mind!"
Mrs. Whittaker said impatiently.

"And you're only making me conspicuous for something that's ENTIRELY in
your own brain!" blazed Billy. As usual, her influence over her father
was instantaneous.

"Because I love you, you know that," he said meekly. "I--I may be TOO
careful, Billy. But--"

"Nonsense!" said Billy in a nervous undertone close to tears. "If you
loved me you'd have some consideration for me!"

"When I say a thing, don't you say it's nonsense," Clarence said with
heavy fatherly dignity. "I'll tell you why--because I won't stand for
it!"

"Oh, aren't they hopeless!" Mrs. Whittaker asked with an indulgent
laugh and a glance for Rachael.

"Well, I won't be taken home like a bad child!" flamed Billy.

"I'd like to bump both your silly heads together," Rachael exclaimed,
steering them toward the porch. "Yes, you bring the car around, Kent,"
she added to one of the onlookers in an urgent aside. "Come on, Bill?
get in. Get in, Clarence! Don't be an utter fool--"

In another moment it was settled. Billy, looking fretty and sulky,
said: "Good-bye, Aunt Gertrude! I'm sorry for this, but it's not my
fault!" Frank Whittaker almost bodily lifted his somewhat befuddled
guest into the car, the door of the runabout went home with a bang.
Billy snatched the wheel, and Clarence, with an attempt at a martyred
expression, sank back in his seat. The car rocked out of sight, and was
gone.

Rachael, in silent dignity, turned about on the wide brick steps to
reenter the house. Where there had been a dozen interested faces a
moment ago there was no one now except Gertrude Whittaker, whose
expression betrayed her as tactfully divided between unconcern and
sympathy, and Frank Whittaker, who was looking thoughtfully at the
cloudless spring sky as one anticipating a change of weather.

Rachael caught Mrs. Whittaker's eye and shrugged her shoulders wearily.
She began slowly to mount the steps.

"It was nothing at all!" said the hostess cheerfully, adding
immediately, "You poor thing!"

"All in the day's work!" Rachael said, on a long sigh. And turning to
the man who stood silently in the doorway she asked, with all the
confidence of a weary child, "Will you take me home, Greg?"

Her glance and the doctor's met. In the last soft, brilliant light of
the afternoon long shadows fell from the great trees nearby. Rachael's
green and white gown was dappled with blots of golden light, her
troubled, glowing eyes were of an almost unearthly beauty, and her
slender figure, against the background of colonial white paint and red
brick, had all the tremulous, reedy grace of a young girl's figure. In
the long look the two exchanged there was some new element born of this
wonderful hour of spring, and of the woman's need, and the man's
nearness. Both knew it, although Rachael did not speak again, and, also
in silence, the doctor nodded, and went past her down the steps for his
car.

"Too bad!" Mrs. Whittaker said, coming back from a brief disappearance
beyond the doorway. "But such things will happen! It's too bad,
Rachael, but what can one do? Are you going to be warm enough? Sure?
Don't give it another thought, dear, nobody noticed it, anyway. And
listen--any chance of a game tonight? I could send over for you.
Marian's with me, you know, and we could get Peter or Greg for a
fourth."

"No chance at all," Rachael said bitterly. She had always loved to play
bridge with Greg; under the circumstances it would be a delicious
experience. She layed brilliantly, and Greg, when he was matched by
partner and opponents, became absorbed in the game with absolutely
fanatic fervor. Rachael had a vision of her own white hand spreading
out the cards, of the nod and glance that said clearly: "Great bidding,
Rachael; we're as safe as a church!"

Clarence did not play bridge, he did not care for music, for books, for
pictures. He played poker, and sometimes tennis, and often golf; a
selfish, solitary game of golf, in which he cared only for his own play
and his own score, and paid no attention to anyone else.

Gregory's great car came round the drive. "Good-bye, Gertrude," said
Rachael with an unsmiling nod of farewell, and Mrs. Whittaker thought,
as Elinor Vanderwall had thought the night before, that she had never
seen Rachael look so serious before, and that things in the
Breckenridge family must be coming rapidly to a crisis.

Doctor Gregory, as the lovely Mrs. Breckenridge packed her striped
green and white ruffles trimly beside him, turned upon her a quick and
affectionate smile. It asked no confidence, it expressed no sympathy,
it was simply the satisfied glance of a man pleased with the moment and
with the company in which he found himself. To Rachael, overwrought,
nervous, and ashamed, no mood could have been more delicately tuned.
She sank back against the deep upholstery luxuriously, and drew a long
breath, inhaling 

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