“Oh, Rachael, you’re hopeless!” Gertrude laughed, and Rachael colored again.  She flushed whenever she thought of this particular visit.

Far happier were the days they spent with the Valentines at Clark’s Bar.  Rachael loved them all dearly, from little Katharine to the big quiet doctor; she was not misunderstood nor laughed at here.

They swam, tramped, played cards, and talked tirelessly.  Rachael slept like a child on the wide, windbathed porch.  To the great satisfaction of both doctors she and Alice grew to be devoted friends, and when Warren’s holiday was over, Rachael stayed on, for a longer visit, and the men came down in the car on Fridays.

On her birthday this year her husband gave Rachael Gregory, and her heirs and assigns forever, a roomy, plain old colonial farmhouse that stood near Alice’s house, in a ring of great elms, looking down on the green level surface of the sea.  Rachael accepted it with wild delight.  She loved the big, homelike halls, the simple fireplaces, the green blinds that shut a sweet twilight into the empty rooms.  Her own barns, her own strip of beach, her own side yard where she and Alice could sit and talk, she took eager possession of them all.

She went into town for chintzes, papers, wicker tables and chairs.  She brought old Mrs. Gregory down for the housewarming, and had all the Valentines to dinner on the August evening when the Gregorys moved in.  And late that same evening, when Warren’s arms were about her, she told him her great news.  There were to be little feet running about Home Dunes, and a little voice echoing through the new home.  “Shall you be glad, Greg?” she asked, with tears in her eyes; “shall you be just a little jealous?”

“Rachael!” he said in a quick, tense whisper, afraid to believe her.  And Rachael, caught in his dear arms, and with his cheek against her wet lashes, felt a triumph and a confidence rise within her, and a glorious content that it was so.

When the happy suspicion was a happy certainty she told his mother, and entered at once into the world of advice and reassurance, planning and speculation that belongs to women alone.  Mrs. Valentine was also full of eager interest and counsel, and Rachael enjoyed their solicitude and affection as she had enjoyed few things in life.  This was a perfectly natural symptom, that was a perfectly natural phase, she must do this thing, get that, and avoid a third.

The fact that she was not quite herself in soul or body, that she must be careful, must be guarded and saved, was a source of strange and mysterious satisfaction to her as the quick months slipped by.  Her increasing helplessness shut her quite naturally away into a world that contained only her husband and herself and a few intimate friends, and Rachael found this absolutely satisfying, and did not miss the social world that hummed on as busily and gayly as ever without her.

Her baby was born in March, a beautiful boy, like his father even in the first few moments of his life.  Rachael, whose experience had been, to her astonishment, described complacently by physician and nurses as “perfectly normal,” was slow to recover from the experience in body; perhaps never quite recovered in soul.  It changed all her values of life—­this knowledge of what the coming of a child costs; she told Alice that she was glad of the change.