“But I thought she wasn’t so successful last winter, Warren?”

“I don’t know,” he said politely, wearily, uninterestedly.

“How did you hear this, Warren?” his wife asked, with a deceitful air of innocence.

“Met her,” he answered briefly.

“Well, we must see the play,” Rachael said briskly.  For some reason her heart was lighter than it had been for weeks.  This was something definite and in the open at last after all these days of blundering in the dark.  “We could take a box, couldn’t we, and ask George and Alice?” she added.  Warren’s expression was that of a boy whose way with his first sweetheart is too suddenly favored by parents and guardians, and Rachael could have laughed at his face.

“Well,” he said without enthusiasm.  A week later he told her that he had secured the box, but suggested that someone else than the Valentines be asked, Elinor and Peter, for instance.

“You and George aren’t quite as good friends as you were, are you?” Rachael said, gravely.

“Quite,” Warren said with his bright, deceptive smile and his usual averted glance.  “Ask anyone you please—­it was merely a suggestion!”

Rachael asked Peter and Elinor, and gave them a delicious dinner before the play.  She looked her loveliest, a little fuller in figure than she had been seven years before, and with gray here and there in her rich hair, but still a beautiful and winning presence, and still with something of youth in her spontaneous, quick speech and ready laughter.  Warren was, as always, the attentive host, but Rachael noticed that he was abstracted and nervous to-night, and wondered, with a chill at her heart, if Magsie’s new venture meant so much to him as his manner implied.

It was an early dinner, and they reached the theatre before the curtain rose.

“It looks like a good house,” said Rachael, settling herself comfortably.

“You can’t tell anything by this,” Warren said, quickly; “it’s a first night and papered.”

“Aren’t you smart with your professional terms?” Elinor Pomeroy laughed, dropping the lorgnette through which she had been idly studying the house.  “What I’D like to know,” she added interestedly, “what I’D like to know is, who’s doing this for Magsie Clay?  Vera Villalonga says she knows, but I don’t believe it.  Magsie’s a little nobody, she has no special talent, and here she is leading in a Barrett play—­”

Peter Pomeroy’s foot here pressed lightly against Rachael’s; a hint, Rachael instantly suspected, that was intended for his wife.

“Now I think Magsie’s as straight as a string,” the unconscious Mrs. Pomeroy went on, “but she must have a rich beau up her sleeve, and the question is, who is he?  I don’t—­”

But here, it was evident, Peter’s second appeal to his wife’s discretion was felt, and it suddenly arrested her flow of eloquence.

“—­I don’t doubt,” floundered Elinor, “that—­that is—­and of course Magsie is a talented creature, so that naturally—­ naturally—­some girl makes a hit every year, and why shouldn’t it be Magsie?  Which is right, Peter, ‘why shouldn’t it be she’ or ‘why shouldn’t it be her?’ I never know,” she finished somewhat incoherently.