“I know you are, Greg!” she answered gratefully.  “And I know,” she added, in a low tone, “that you are one of the persons who will understand—­when I end it all!”

“End it all!” he echoed sharply.

“Not suicide,” she reassured him smilingly.  She flung herself back in her chair again, holding her white hand, with its ring, between her face and the fire.  “No,” she said thoughtfully, “I mean divorce.”

There eyes met; both were pale, serious.

“Divorce!” he echoed, after a pause.  “I never thought of it—­for you!”

“I haven’t thought of it myself, much,” Rachael admitted, with a troubled smile.

As a matter of fact she had thought of it, since the early days of her marriage, but never as an actual possibility.  She had preferred bondage and social position to freedom and the uncomfortable status of the divorced woman.  She realized now that she might think of it in a slightly different way.  She had been a penniless nobody seven years ago; she was a personage now.  The mere fact that he was a Breckenridge would win some sympathy for Clarence, but she would have her faction, too.

More than that, she would never be younger, never handsomer, never better able to take the plunge, and face the consequences.

“I’m twenty-eight, Greg,” she said reasonably, “I’m not stupid, I’m not plain—­don’t interrupt me!  Is this to be my fate?  I’m capable of loving—­of living—­I don’t want to be bored—­bored—­ bored for the rest of my life!”

Warren Gregory, stunned and surprised, eyed her sympathetically.

“Belvedere Bay bore you?” he asked, smiling a little uneasily.

“No—­it’s not that.  I don’t want more dinners and dances and jewels and gowns!” Rachael answered musingly.  She stared sombrely at the fire, and there was a moment’s silence.

Suddenly her mood changed.  She smiled, and locking her hands together, as she leaned far forward in her chair, she looked straight into his eyes.

“Greg,” she said, “do you know what I’d like to be?  I’d like to be far away from cities and people, a fisherman’s wife on an ocean shore, with a baby coming every year, and just the delicious sea to watch!  I could be a good wife, Greg, if anybody really—­loved me!”

Laughing as she looked at him, she did not disguise the fact that tears misted her lashes.  Warren Gregory felt himself stirred as he had not been before in his life.

“Well,” he said, with an unsteady laugh, “you could be anything!  With you for his wife, what couldn’t a man do!”

Hardly conscious of what he did or said, he got to his feet, and she stood, too, smiling up at him.  Both were breathing hard.

“To think,” he said, with a sort of repressed violence, “that you, of all women, should be Clarence Breckenridge’s wife!”

“Not long!” she answered, in a whisper.

“You mean that you are really going to leave him, Rachael?”