“Yes, I must see Billy when she comes back!” Rachael said quickly, when the tranquillizing voice reached this point.  If Warren Gregory’s quiet mouth registered any opposition, she did not see it, and he did not express it.  She was presently sound asleep, still catching a long childish breath as she slept.  But she woke smiling, with all the horrid visions of the past few days apparently blotted out, and she and Warren went gayly downtown to get steamer tickets, and buy appropriate frocks and hats for the spring heat of Bermuda.

In midsummer came the inevitable invitation to visit old friends at Belvedere Bay.  Rachael was pleased to accept Mrs. Moran’s hospitality for a glorious July week.  Warren, to her delight, took an eightdays’ holiday, and while he looked to his racquet and golf irons she packed her prettiest gowns.  Belvedere Bay welcomed them rapturously, and beautiful Mrs. Gregory was the idol of the hour.  Mrs. Moulton, giving a tennis tea during this week, duly sent Mrs. Gregory a card.  But when society wondering whether Rachael would really be a guest in her own old home, had duly gathered at the Breckenridge house, young Dicky Moran was so considerate as to be flung from his riding-horse.  Neither the Gregorys nor the Morans consequently appeared at the tea, but Rachael, meeting all inquirers on the Moran terrace, late in the afternoon, with the news that Dicky was quite all right, no harm done, asked prettily for details of the affair they had missed.

She told herself that the past really made no difference in the radiant present, but she knew it was not so.  In a thousand little ways she had lost caste, and she saw it, if Warren did not.  A certain bloom was gone.  Girls were not quite as deferentially adoring, women were a little less impressed.  The old prestige was somehow lessened.  She knew that newcomers at the club, struck by her beauty, were a little chilled by her history.  She felt the difference in the very air.

In her musings she went over the old arguments hotly.  Why was she merely the “divorced Mrs. Gregory?” Why were these casual inquirers not told of Clarence, of her long endurance of neglect and shame?  More than once the thought came to her, that if other, events had been as they were, and only the facts of her divorce and remarriage lacking, she would have been Clarence’s widow now.

“What’s the difference?  It all comes out the same!” commented Warren, to whom she confided this thought.

“Then you and I would have been only engaged now,” said Rachael, smiling.  “And I would like that!”

“You mean you regret your marriage?” he laughed, his arms about her.

“I’d like to live the first days over and over and over again, Greg!” she answered passionately.

“You are an insatiable creature!” he said.  But her earnestness was beginning to puzzle him a little.  She was too deeply wrapped in her love for her own happiness or his.  There was something almost startling in her intensity.  She was jealous of every minute that they were apart; she made no secret of her blind adoration.