“Well, it may not—­that’s thrue.  But these roads will be in a grand mess if we have anny more rain—­that’s a fact for ye,” Kane persisted.

“Then don’t come until Wednesday,” suggested Alice.

“Oh, Alice, but I’ll be so frantic to see my boy!”

“Twenty-four hours more, you goose!” Alice laughed.  Rachael laughed, too, and took several surreptitious kisses from the back of Jimmy’s neck as a fortification against the coming separation.

Indeed, she found it unbelievably hard to leave him, trotting happily upstairs with his beloved Katharine, and to go about her day’s business anticipating the long trip back to Home Dunes without him.  However, there were not many hours to spare, and Rachael had much to do.  She set herself systematically to work.

By one o’clock everything was done, with an hour to spare for train time.  But she had foolishly omitted luncheon, and felt tired and dizzy.  She turned toward a downtown lunchroom, and was held at the crossing of Fifth Avenue and one of the thirties idly watching the crowd of cars that delayed her when she saw Warren in his car.

He was on the cross street, and so also stopped, but he did not see her.  Martin was at the wheel, Warren buttoned to the neck in a gray coat, his hat well down over his eyes, alone in the back seat.  He was staring steadily, yet with unseeing eyes, before him, and Rachael felt a sense of almost sickening shock at the sight of his altered face.  Warren, looking tired and depressed, looking discouraged, and with some new look of diffidence and hurt, besides all these, in his face!  Warren old!  Warren old!

Rachael felt as if she should faint.  She was rooted where she stood.  Fifth Avenue pushed gayly and busily by her under the leaden sky.  Furred old ladies, furred little girls, messenger boys and club men, jostling, gossiping, planning.  Only she stood still.  And after a while she looked again where Warren had been.  He was gone.  But had he seen her? her heart asked itself with wild clamor.  Had he seen her?

She began to walk rapidly and blindly, conscious of taking a general direction toward the Terminal Station, but so vague as to her course that she presently looked bewilderedly about to find that she was in Eighth Avenue and that, standing absolutely still again, and held by thought, she was being curiously regarded by a policeman.  She gave the man a dazed and sickly smile.

“I am afraid I am a little out of my way,” she stammered.  “I am going to the station.”

He pointed out the direction, and she thanked him, and blindly went on her way.  But her heart was tearing like a living thing in her breast, and she walked like a wounded creature that leaves a trail of life blood.