“Kent!  She wouldn’t look at him!” Warren said comfortably.

“It would be a brilliant match for her,” Rachael countered quietly.

She saw that she had antagonized him, but he did not speak again.  One of their unhappy silences fell.

Home Dunes, as always, restored health and color magically.  Rachael felt more like herself after the first night’s sleep on the breezy porch, the first invigorating dip in the ocean.  She began to enjoy her meals again, she began to look carefully to her appearance.  Presently she was laughing, singing, bubbling with life and energy.  Alice, watching her, rejoiced and marvelled at her recovery.  Rachael’s beauty, her old definite self-reliance, came back in a flood.  She fairly radiated charm, glowing as she held George and Alice under the spell of her voice, the spell of her happy planning.  Her letters to Warren were in the old, tender, vivacious strain.  She was interested in everything, delighted with everything in Clark’s Hills.  She begged him for news; Vivian had a baby?  And Kent Parmalee was engaged to Eliza Bowditch—­what did Magsie’s say?  And did he miss her?  The minute she got home she was going to talk to him about having a big porch built on, outside the nursery, and at the back of the house; what about it?  Then the children could sleep out all the year through.  George and Alice positively stated that they were going around the world in two years, and if they did, why couldn’t the Gregorys go, too?

“You’re wonderful!” said Alice one day.  “You’re not the same woman you were last winter!”

“I was ill last winter, woman!  And never so ill as when they all thought I was entirely cured!  Besides—­” Rachael looked down at her tanned arm and slender brown fingers marking grooves in the sand.  “Besides, it’s partly—­bluff, Alice,” she confessed.  “I’m fighting myself these days.  I don’t want to think that we—­Greg and I—­can’t go back, can’t be to each other—­what we were!”

What an April creature she was, thought Alice, seeing that tears were close to the averted eyes, and hearing the tremble in Rachael’s voice.

“Goose!” she said tenderly.  “You were a nervous wreck last year, and Warren was working far too hard!  Make haste slowly, Rachael.”

“But it’s three weeks since he was here,” Rachael said in a low voice.  “I don’t understand it, that’s all!”

“Nor I—­nor he!” Alice said, smiling.

“Next week!” Rachael predicted bravely.  And a second later she had sprung up from the sand and was swimming through the surf as if she swam from her own intolerable thoughts.

The next week-end would bring him she always told herself, and usually after two or three empty Sundays there would come a happy one, with the new car which was built like a projectile, purring in the road, George and Alice shouting greetings as they came in the gate, Louise excitedly attempting to outdo herself on the dinner, and the sunburned noisy babies shrieking themselves hoarse as they romped with their father.