She grew beautiful, with a fine and distinguished beauty definite in its appeal; before she was seven-teen she had her little reputation for it; she moved easily into a circle higher than even her father had ever known.  She was witty, young, lovely, and in this happier atmosphere her natural gayety and generosity might well develop.  She went about continually, and every year the circle of her friends was widened by more distinguished names.

At seventeen Mrs. Gouveneur Pomeroy of New York brought the young beauty back with her own daughter, Persis, for a winter in the great American city, and when Persis died Rachael indeed became almost as dear to the stricken parents.  When she went back to London they gave her not only gifts but money, and for two years she returned to them for long visits.  So America had a chance to admire the ravishing Miss Fairfax, too, and Rachael had many conquests and one or two serious affairs.  The girls had their first dances at the Belvedere Club; Rachael met them all, who were later to be her neighbors:  the Morans and Parmalees, the Vanderwalls and the Torrences, and the Chases.  She met Clarence Breckenridge and his wife, and the exquisitely dressed little girl who was Billy to-day.

And through all her adventures she looked calmly, confidently, and with conscious enjoyment for a husband.  She flirted a little, and danced and swam and drove and played golf and tennis a great deal, but she never lost sight for an instant of the serious business of life.  Money she must have—­it was almost as essential to her as air—­and money she could only secure through a marriage.

The young Englishman who was her first choice, in her twentieth year, had every qualification in the world.  When he died, two or three months before the wedding-day, Rachael’s mother was fond of saying in an aside to close friends that the girl’s heart was broken.  Rachael, lovely in her black, went down to stay with Stephen’s mother, and for several weeks was that elderly lady’s greatest comfort in life.  Silent and serious, her manner the perfection of quiet grief, only Rachael herself knew how little the memory of Stephen interfered with her long reveries as she took his collies about in the soft autumn fogs.  Only Rachael knew how the sight of Trecastle Hall, the horses, the servants, and the park filled her heart with despair.  She might have been Lady Trecastle!  All this might so easily have been her own!

She had loved Stephen, of course, she told herself; loving, with Rachael, simply meant a willingness to accept and to give.  But love was of course a luxury; she was after the necessities of life.  Well, she had played and lost, but she could play again.  So she went to the Pomeroys’ for the winter, and in the spring was brought back to London by her father’s sudden death.