There was a delicate and scornful emphasis on the word “sick” that brought the blood to Clarence Breckenridge’s face.  Billy flushed, too, and an angry light flamed into her eyes.

“That’s not fair, Rachael!” the girl said hotly, “and you know it’s not!”

The glances of the three crossed.  Billy was breathing hard; Clarence, shakily holding a fresh match to his cold cigarette, sent a lowering look from daughter to wife.  Rachael shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, I’ll have my breakfast,” she said, and turning she went from the room and downstairs to the sunshiny breakfast porch.  There were flowers on the little round table, a bright glitter was struck from silver and glass, an icy grapefruit, brimming with juice, stood at her place.  The little room was all windows, and to-day the cretonne curtains had been pushed back to show the garden brave in new spring green, the exquisite freshness of elm and locust trees that bordered it, and far away the slopes of the golf green, with the scarlet and white dots that were early players moving over it.  Sunshine flooded the world, great plumes of white and purple lilac rustled in their tents of green leaves, a bee blundered from the blossoming wistaria vine into the room, and blundered out again.  Far off Rachael heard a cock breaking the Sabbath stillness with a prolonged crow, and as the clock in the dining-room chimed one silver note for the half-hour, the bells of the church in the little village of Belvedere Bay began to ring.

Of the comfort, the beauty, and the harmony of all this, however, Rachael saw and felt nothing.  Her brief interview with her husband had left a bitter taste in her mouth.  She felt neither courage nor appetite for the new day.  Annie carried away the blue bowl of porridge untouched, reporting to Ellie:  “She don’t want no eggs, nor sausage, nor waffles—­nothing more!”

Ellie, the cook, who boarded a four-year-old daughter with the gardener and his wife, at the gate-lodge, was deep in the robust charms of this young person, and not sorry to be uninterrupted.

“Thank goodness she don’t,” she said.  “Do you want a little waffle all for yourself, Lovey?  Do you want to pour the batter into Ma’s iron yourself?  Pin a napkin round her, Annie!  An’ then you can eat it out on the steps, darlin’, because it just seems to be a shame to spend a minute indoors when God sends us a mornin’ like this!”

“It must have been grand, walking to church this morning, all right,” said Alfred, who was busy with golf sticks and emery on the vine-shaded porch.

“It was!” said Ellie and Annie together, and Annie added:  “Rose from Bowditch’s was there, and she says she can’t get away but about once a month.  She always has to wait on the children’s breakfast at eight, and then down comes the others at half-past nine, or later, the way she never has a moment until it’s too late for High!  I told her she had a right to look for another place!”