Her voice was like some living thing writhing in anguish.  George could think of nothing to say.  He looked about helplessly, buttoned a glove button briskly, folded the letter, and made some work of putting it away in an inside pocket.

“Well,” Rachael said, straightening up suddenly, and with resolute courage returning to her manner and voice, “you’ll have, somebody look it up, will you, George?”

“You may depend upon it-immediately,” George said huskily.  “It—­of course it will make an immense difference,” he added, in his anxiety to be reassuring saying exactly the wrong thing.

Rachael was pale.

“I don’t know how anything can make a great difference now, George,” she answered slowly.  “The thing remains—­a fact.  Of course this ends, in one way, the sordid side, the fear of publicity, of notoriety.  But that wasn’t the phase of it that ever counted with me.  This will probably hurt Warren—­”

“Oh, Rachael, dear old girl, don’t talk that way!” George protested.  “You can’t believe that Warren will feel anything but a—­a most unbelievable relief!  We all know that.  He’s not the first man who let a pretty face drive him crazy when he was working himself to death.”  George was studying her as he spoke, with all his honest heart in his look, but Rachael merely shook her head forlornly.

“Perhaps I don’t understand men,” she said with a mildness that George found infinitely more disturbing than any fury would have been.

“Well, I’ll look up records at the City Hall,” he said after a pause.  “That’s the first thing to do.  And then I’ll let you know.  Boys well this morning?”

“Lovely,” Rachael smiled.  “My trio goes fishing to-day, packing its lunch itself, and asking no feminine assistance.  The lunch will be eaten by ten o’clock, and the boys home at half-past ten, thinking it is almost sundown.  They only go as far as the cove, where the men are working, and we can see the tops of their heads from the upstairs’ porch, so Mary and I won’t feel entirely unprotected.  I’m to lunch with Alice, so my day is nicely planned!”

The bright look did not deceive him, nor the reassuring tone.  But George Valentine’s friendship was more easily displayed by deeds than words, and now, with an affectionate pat for her hand, he touched his starter, and the car leaped upon its way.  Just four hours later he telephoned Alice that the wedding license of Margaret Rose Clay and Richard Gardiner had indeed been issued a week before, and that Magsie was not to be found at her apartment, which was to be sublet at the janitor’s discretion; that Bowman’s secretary reported the absence of Miss Clay from the city, and the uncertainty of her appearing in any of Mr. Bowman’s productions that winter, and that at the hospital a confident inquiry for “Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner” had resulted in the discreet reply that “the parties” had left for California.  George, with what was for him a rare flash of imagination, had casually inquired as to the name of the clergyman who had performed the ceremony, being answered dispassionately that the person at the other end of the telephone “didn’t know.”