“If you please,” Rachael answered, scarlet-cheeked.

“Well, I can write a check—­” he began.

“Here’s this check of Mary Moulton’s for July,” Rachael said, nervously adding:  “She wants to pay month by month, because I think she hopes you’ll rent after August.  I believe she’d keep the place indefinitely, on account of being near her mother, and for the boys.”

Clarence took the check, and, hardly glancing at it, scrawled his slovenly “C.  L. Breckenridge” across the back with a gold-mounted fountain pen.  Rachael, whose face was burning, received it back from his hand with a husky “Thank you.  You’ll have to furnish the grounds, I presume—­there will be a referee—­nothing need get out beyond the fact that I am the complainant.  You—­won’t contest?  You—­won’t oppose anything?” She hated herself for the question, but it had to be asked.

“Nope,” the man said impatiently.

“And”—­Rachael hesitated—­“and you won’t say anything, Clarence,” she suggested, “because the papers will get hold of it fast enough!”

“You can’t tell me anything about that,” he said sullenly.  Then there came a silence.  Rachael, looking at him, wished that she could hate him a little more, wished that his neglects and faults had made a little deeper impression.  For a minute or two neither spoke.  Then Clarence got up and left the room, and Rachael sat still, the little slip held lightly between her fingers.  The color ebbed slowly from her face, her heart resumed its normal beat, moments went by, the little clock on her desk ticked on and on.  It was all over; she was free.  She felt strangely shaken and cold, and desolately lonely.

He loved her as little as she loved him.  They had never needed each other, yet there was in this severance of the bond between them a strange and unexpected pain.  It was as if Rachael’s heart yearned over the wasted years, the love and happiness that might have been.  Not even the thought of Warren Gregory seemed warm or real to-day; a great void surrounded her spirit; she felt a chilled weariness with the world, with all men—­she was sick of life.

On the following day she gave Florence a hint of the situation.  It was only fair to warn the important, bustling matron a trifle in advance of the rest of the world.  Rachael had had a long night’s sleep; she already began to feel deliciously young and free.  She was to spend a few nights at the Havilands’, and the next week supposedly go to the Princes’ at Bar Harbor; really she planned to disappear for a time from her world.  She must go up to town for a consultation with her lawyer, and then, when the storm broke, she would slip away to little Quaker Bridge, the tiny village far down on Long Island upon which, quite by chance, she had stumbled two years before.  No one would recognize her there, no one of her old world could find her, and there for a month or two she could walk and bathe and dream in wonderful solitude.  Then—­then Greg would be home again.