“Dead, poor Clarence!” said Mrs. Prince, magnificent as Queen Elizabeth, as she and Elinor Vanderwall went downstairs.  She had once danced a fancy dance with him more than twenty years ago.  “Awful!” said Elinor, shuddering.

After the last guest was gone Warren telephoned to the hospital, Rachael, a little tired and pale in the Indian costume, watching and listening tensely.  She was sick at heart.  Even into the library, where they stood, the Mardi-Gras disorder had penetrated:  a blue silk mask was lying across Warren’s blotter, a spatter of confetti lay on the polished floor, and on the reading table was a tray on which were two glasses through whose amber contents a lazy bubble still occasionally rose.  The logs that had snapped in the fireplace were gone, only gray ashes remained, and to Rachael, at least, the room’s desolation and disorder seemed to typify her own state of mind.

She could tell from Warren’s look that he found the whole matter painful and distasteful to an almost unbearable degree; on his handsome serious face was an expression of grim endurance, of hurt yet dignified protest against events.  He did not blame her, how could he blame her?  But he was suffering in every fibre of his sensitive soul at this sordid notoriety, at this blatant voicing of a hundred ugly whispers in a matter so closely touching the woman he loved.

“Dead?” Rachael said quietly, when his brief conversation was over.

Warren Gregory, setting the telephone back upon the desk, nodded gravely.

Rachael made no comment.  For a moment her eyes widened nervously, and a little shudder rippled through her.  Then silently she gathered up the leather belt and chains of beads that she had been loosening as she listened, and slowly went toward the door.

They did not speak again of Clarence that night, although they chatted easily for the next hour on other topics, even laughing a little as the various episodes of the evening were passed in review.

But Rachael did not sleep, nor did she sleep during the long hours of the following night.  On the third night she wakened her husband suddenly from his sleep.

“Greg—­Greg!  Won’t you talk to me a little?  I’m going mad, I think!”

“Rachael!  What is it?” stammered the doctor, blinking in the dim light of Rachael’s bedside lamp.  His wife, haggard, with her rich hair falling in two long braids over her shoulders, was sitting on the side of his bed.  “What is it, darling—­hear something?” he asked, more naturally, putting his arm about her.

“I’ve been lying awake—­and lying awake!” said Rachael, panting.  “I haven’t shut my eyes—­it’s nearly three.  Greg, I keep seeing it—­Clarence’s face, you know, with that horrible scar!  What shall I do?”

Shivering, gasping, wild-eyed, she clung to him, and for a long hour he soothed her as if she had been an hysterical child.  He put her into a comfortable chair, mixed her a sedative, and knelt beside her, slowly winning her back to calm and sanity again.  It was terrible, of course, but no one but Clarence himself was to blame, unless it was poor Billy—­