“You see, Warren,” she said presently, “I’m not a girl.  I give myself to you with a knowledge and a joy no girl could possibly have.  I don’t want to coquette and delay.  I want to be your wife, and to learn your faults, and have you learn mine, and settle down into harness—­one year, five years—­ten years married!  Oh, you don’t know how I long to be ten years married.  I shan’t mind a bit being nearly forty.  Forty—­doesn’t it sound settled, and sedate—­ and that’s what I want.  I—­I shall love getting gray, and feeling that you and I don’t care so much about going places, don’t you know?  We’ll like better just being home together, won’t we?  We’re older than most people now, aren’t we?”

He laughed aloud at the bright face so enchantingly young in its restored beauty.  He had expected to find her charming, but in this new phase of girlishness, of happiness, she was a thousand times more charming than he had dreamed.  It was hard to believe that this eager girl in a striped blue and yellow and purple skirt, and rough white crash hat, was the bored, the remote, the much-feared Mrs. Clarence Breckenridge.  Something free and sweet and virginal had come back to her, or been born in her.  She was like no phase of the many phases in which he had known her; she was a Rachael who had never known the sordid, the disillusioning side of life.  Even her seriousness had the confident, eager quality of youth, and her gayety was as pure as a child’s.  She had cast off the old sophistication, the old recklessness of speech; she was not even interested in the old associates.  The world for her was all in him and their love for each other, and she walked back to Quaker Bridge, at his side, too wholly swept away from all self-consciousness to know or to care that they were at once the target for all eyes.

A wonderful day followed, many wonderful days.  Doctor Gregory’s great touring car and his livened man were at Mrs. Dimmick’s door when they got back, an incongruous note in little Quaker Bridge, still gasping from the great storm.

“Your car?” Rachael said.  “You drove down?”

“Yesterday.  I put up at Valentine’s—­George Valentine’s, you know, at Clark’s Hills.”

“Oh, that’s my nice lady—­gray haired, and with three children?” Rachael said eagerly.  “Do you know her?”

“Know her?  Valentine is my closest associate.  They meet us in town to-morrow:  he’s to be best man.  You’ll have to have them to dinner once a month for the rest of your life!”

The picture brought her happy color, the shy look he loved.

“I’m glad, Greg.  I like her immensely!”

They were at the car; she must flush again at the chauffeur’s greeting, finding a certain grave significance, a certain acceptance, in his manner.

“Wife and baby well, Martin?”

“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Breckenridge.”

“Still in Belvedere Hills?”

“Well, just at present, yes, Madam.”