To be held tight in his arms, to get his first big kiss, to come into the house still clinging to him, was bliss to Rachael now.  But as the summer wore away she noticed that in a few hours the joy of homecoming would fade for him, he would become fitfully talkative, moodily silent, he would wonder why the Valentines were always late, and ask his wife patiently if she would please not hum, his head ached—­

“Dearest!  Why didn’t you say so!”

“I don’t know.  It’s been aching all day!”

“And you let those great boys climb all over you!”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“Would you like a nap, Warren, or would you like to go over to the beach, just you and me, and have a swim?”

“No, thank you.  I may run the car into Katchogue”—­Katchogue, seven miles away, was the site of the nearest garage—­“and have that fellow look at my magneto.  She didn’t act awfully well coming down!”

“Would you like me to go with you, Warren?”

“Love it, my dear, but I have to take Pierre.  He’s got twice the sense I have about it!”

And again a sense of heaviness, of helplessness, would fall upon Rachael, so that on Sunday afternoon it was almost a relief to have him go away.

“Well,” she would say in the nursery again, after the good-byes, kissing the fat little shoulder of Gerald Fairfax Gregory where the old baby white ran into the new boyish tan, “we will not be introspective and imaginative, and cry for the moon.  We will take off our boys’ little old, hot rumply shirts, and put them into their nice cool nighties, and be glad that we have everything in the world—­almost!  Get me your Peter Rabbit Book, Jimmy, and get up here on my other arm.  Everybody hasn’t the same way of showing love, and the main thing is to be grateful that the love is there.  Daddy loves his boys, and his home, and his boys’ mother, only it doesn’t always occur to him that—­”

“Are you talking for me, or for you, Mother?” Jimmy would sometimes ask, after puzzled and attentive listening.

“For me, this time, but now I’ll talk for you!” Rachael satisfied her hungry heart with their kisses, and was never so happy as when both fat little bodies were in her arms.  She grudged every month that carried them away from babyhood, and one day Alice Valentine found her looking at a book of old photographs with an expression of actual sadness on her face.

“Look at Jim, Alice, that second summer—­before Derry was born!  Wasn’t he the dearest little fatty, tumbling all over the place!”

“Rachael, don’t speak as if the child was dead!” Alice laughed.

“Well, one loses them almost as completely,” Rachael said, smiling.  “Jim is such a great big, brown, mischievous creature now, and to think that my Derry is nearly two!”

“Think of me, with Mary fifteen!” Mrs. Valentine countered, “and just as baby-hungry as ever!  But I shall have to do nothing but chaperon now, for a few years, and wait for the grandchildren.”