He paused, confused, unable to find the right words.

“You’ve been facing this all alone,” he continued presently.  “Poor Rachael!  You’ve been splendid—­wonderfully brave!  You have me beside you now; I’ll help you if I may.  Some day we may find a way out!  Well,” he finished abruptly, “suppose I go up and see Clarence?”

For answer she rose, and without speaking again went ahead of him up the stairway and left him at the door of her husband’s room.  He did not see her again that night.

Half an hour later he came down, dismissed his car, and walked home under the spring stars.  In his veins, like a fire, still ran the excited, glorious consciousness of his madness.  In his ears still echoed the wonderful golden voice; he could hear her very words, and he took certain phrases from his memory, and gloated over them as another man might have gloated over strings of pearls:  “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!” “Greg—­don’t frighten me!”

Exquisite, desirable, enchanting—­every inch of her—­her voice, her eyes, her slender hand with its gold circle.  What a woman!  What a wife!  What radiant youth and beauty and charm—­and all trampled in the mire by Clarence Breckenridge, of all insensate brutes!  How could laughter and courage and beauty survive it?

He was going to the club, a mile away from the Breckenridge house, but long before the visions born that evening were exhausted, he saw the familiar lights, and the awninged porches, and heard the faint echoes of the orchestra.  They were dancing.

Warren Gregory turned away again, and plunged into the darkness of the roadside afresh.  “My dear Don Quixote!” With what a look of motherly amusement and tenderness she had said it.  What a woman!  He had never kissed her.  He had never even thought of kissing Clarence Breckenridge’s wife.

He thought of his mother, tried to forget her with a philosophical shrug, and found that the slender, black-clad, quiet-voiced vision was not to be so easily dismissed.  It was said of old Madam Gregory that she had never been heard to raise her voice in the course of her sixty honored years.  Of the four sons she had borne, three were dead, and the husband she had loved so faithfully lay beside them.  She was slightly crippled, her outings confined to a slow drive every day.  She was solitary in a retinue of servants.  But that modulated voice and those cool, temperate eyes were still a power.  His mother’s displeasure was a very real thing to Warren Gregory, and the thought of adding another sorrow to the weight on those thin shoulders was not an easy one for him to entertain.