“Oh, yap—­yap—­yap!  My God, I do get tired of hearing you two go on and on and on!” Clarence presently burst out angrily.  “If you don’t want to go, Billy, say so.  I’m sick of the whole thing, anyway!”

“You know very well I never wanted to go,” Billy answered.  And because, being now committed to the Villalonga visit, she perversely dreaded it, she pursued aggrievedly, “I’d ever so much rather have gone to California, Dad!”

How sure the youngster was of her power, Rachael thought, watching him instantly soften under his daughter’s skilful touch.

“For five cents,” he said eagerly, “I’d wire Vera, and you and I’d beat it to Santa Barbara!  What do you say?”

“And if Rachael promised to be awfully good, she could come, too!” Billy laughed.  But the girl’s gay patronage was never again to be extended to Rachael Breckenridge.

“You couldn’t disappoint Vera now,” she protested.

“Oh, Lord! make some objections!” Clarence growled.

“My dear boy, it’s nothing to me, whatever you do,” Rachael said quickly.  “But Vera Villalonga is a very important friend for Bill.  There’s no sense in antagonizing her—­”

“No, I suppose there isn’t,” Billy said slowly.  “But I wish she’d not ask us every summer.  I suppose we shall be doing this for the rest of our lives!”

She trailed slowly from the room, and Clarence took one or two fretful glances at his paper.

“Gosh, how you do love to spoil things!” he said bitterly to his wife in a sudden burst.

Rachael did not answer.  She rose after a few moments, and carried her letters into the adjoining room.  When Clarence presently passed the door she called him in.

“Now or never—­now or never!” said Rachael’s fast-beating heart.  She was pale and breathing quickly as he came in.  But Clarence, sick and headachy, did not notice these signs of strong emotion.

“Clarence, I need some money,” Rachael said simply.

“What for?” he asked unencouragingly.

The color came into his wife’s face.  She did not ask often for money, although he was rich, and she had been his wife for seven years.  It was a continual humiliation to Rachael that she must ask him at all for the little actual money she spent, and tell him what she did with it when she got it.  Clarence might lose more money at poker in a single night than Rachael touched in a month; it had come to him without effort, and of the two, she was the one who made a real effort to hold the home together.  Yet she was a pensioner on his bounty, obliged to wait for the propitious mood and moment.  Under her hand at this moment was Mary Moulton’s check for one thousand dollars, more than she had ever had at one time in her life.  She could not touch it, but Clarence would turn it into bills, and stuff them carelessly into his pocket, to be scattered in the next week or two wherever his idle fancy saw fit.