"Thank you!" Rachael said with a little note of real pleasure under her laugh.

"You've grown so gentle, and good," said Billy a little awkwardly.

"Perhaps it's just because you're so sweet to Breck, and because you have such a nice way with children, but I--I am ever and ever so grateful to you! I've often thought of you, all this time, and of the old days, and been glad that so much happiness of every sort has come to you. At first I felt dreadfully--at that time, you know--"

She stopped and faltered, but Rachael looked at her kindly. They were sitting on the wide porch, under the velvet-black arch of the starry sky, and watching the occasional twinkle of lights on the dark surface of the bay.

"You may say anything you like to me, Billy," Rachael said.

"Well, it was only--you know how I loved him--" Billy said quickly. "I've so often thought that perhaps you were the only person who knew what it all meant to me. I only thought he would be angry for a while. I thought then that Joe would surely win him. And afterward, I thought I would go crazy, thinking of him sitting there in the club. I had failed him, you know! I've never talked about it. I guess I'm all tired out from the trip down."

It was clumsily expressed; the words came as if every one were wrung from the jealous silence of the long years, but presently Billy was beside Rachael's chair, kneeling on the floor, and their arms were about each other.

"I killed him!" sobbed Billy. "He spoke of me the last of all. He said to Berry Stokes that he--he loved me. And he had a little old picture of me--you remember the one in the daisy frame?--over his heart. Oh, Daddy, Daddy!--always so good to me!"

"No, Bill, you mustn't say that you killed him," Rachael said, turning pale. "If you were to blame, I was, too, and your grandmother, and all of us who made him what he was. I didn't love him when I married him, and he was the sort of man who has to be loved; he knew he wasn't big, and admirable, and strong, but many a man like Clancy has been made so, been made worth while, by having a woman believe in him. I never believed in him for one second, and he knew it. I despised him, and where he sputtered and stammered and raged, I was cool and quiet, and smiling at him. It isn't right for human beings to feel that way, I see it now. I see now that love--love is the lubricant everywhere in the world, Bill. One needn't be a fool and be stepped upon; one has rights; but if loving enough goes into everything, why, it's bound to come out right."

"Oh, I do believe it!" said Billy fervently, kneeling on the floor at Rachael's feet, her wet, earnest eyes on Rachael's face, her arms crossed on the older woman's knees.

"I believe," Rachael said, "that in those seven years I might have won your father to something better if I had cared. He wasn't a hard man, just desperately weak. I've thought of it so often, of late, Bill. There might have been children. Clancy had a funny little pathetic fondness for babies. And he was a loving sort of person---"

"Ah, wasn't he?" Billy's eyes brimmed again. "Always that to me.

But not to you, Rachael, and little cat that I was--I knew it. But you see I had no particular reverence for marriage, either. How should I? Why, my own mother and my half-sisters--hideous girls, they are, too--were pointed out to me in Rome a year ago. I didn't know them! I could have made your life much easier, Rachael. I wish I had. I was thinking that this afternoon when Breck was letting you carry him out into deep water, clinging to you so cunningly. He is a cute little kid, isn't he? And he'll love you to death! He's a great kisser."

"He's a great darling," smiled Rachael, "and all small boys I adore. He'll begin to put on weight in no time. And--I was thinking, Bill--he would have reconciled Clancy to you and Joe, perhaps; one can't tell! If I had not left him, Clarence might have been living to-day, that I know. He only--did what he did in one of those desperate lonely times he used to dread so."

"Ah, but he was terrible to you, Rachael!" Billy said generously.

"You deserved happiness if anyone ever did!" Again she did not understand Rachael's sharp sigh, nor the little silence that followed it. Their talk ran on quite naturally to other topics: they discussed all the men and women of that old world they both had known, the changes, the newcomers, and the empty places. Mrs.

Barker Emory had been much taken up by Mary Moulton, and was a recognized leader at Belvedere Bay now; Straker Thomas was in a sanitarium; old Lady Torrence was dead; Marian Cowles had s.n.a.t.c.hed George Pomeroy away from one of the Vanderwall girls at the last second; Thomas Prince was paralyzed; Agnes Chase had married a Denver man whom n.o.body knew; the Parker Hoyts had a delicate little baby at last; Vivian Sartoris had left her husband, n.o.body knew why. Billy was quite her old self as she retailed these items and many more for Rachael's benefit.

But Rachael saw that the years had made a sad change in her before the three days' visit was over. Poor little, impudent, audacious Billy was gone forever--Billy, who had always been so exquisite in dress, so prettily conspicuous on the floor of the ballroom, so superbly self-conscious in her yachting gear, her riding-clothes, her smart little tennis costumes! She was but a shadow of her old self now. The smart hats, the silk stockings, the severely trim frocks were still hers, but the old delicious youth, her roses, her limpid gaze, the velvety curve of throat and cheek, these were gone. Billy had been spirited, now she was noisy. She had been amusingly precocious, now she was a.s.suming an innocence, a naivete, that were no longer hers, had never been natural to her at any time. She had always been coolly indifferent to the lives of other men and women. Now she was embittered as to her own destiny, and full of ugly and eager gossip concerning everyone she knew. She chanced upon the name of Magsie Clay, little dreaming how straight the blow went to Rachael's heart, but had excellent reasons of her own for not expressing the belief that Magsie would soon leave the stage, and so gave no hint of Magsie's rich and mysterious lover. She did tell Rachael that she herself meant to go on the stage, but imparted no details as to her hopes for doing so.

"Just how much money is left, Billy?" Rachael presently felt herself justified in asking.

"Oh, well"--Billy had always hated statistics--"we sold the Belvedere Bay place last year, you know, but it was a perfect wreck, and the Moultons said they had to put seventeen thousand dollars into repairs, but I don't believe it, and that money, and some other things, were put into the bank. Joe was just making a scene about it--we have to draw now and then--we sank I don't know what into those awful ponies, and we still have that place--it's a lovely house, but it doesn't rent. It's too far away. The kid adores it of course, but it's too far away, it gives me the creeps. It's just going to wreck, too. Joe says sometimes that he's going to raise chickens there. I see him!" Billy scowled, but as Rachael did not speak, she presently came back to the topic.

"But just how much of my money is left, I don't know. There are two houses in East One Hundredth--way over by the river. Daddy took them for some sort of debt."

Rachael remembered them perfectly. But she could not revert to the days when she was Clarence's wife without a pang, and so let the allusion go.

"Why he took them I don't know," Billy resumed, "ten flats, and all empty. They say it would cost us ten thousand dollars to get them into shape. They're mortgaged, anyway."

"But Billy, wouldn't that bring you in a fair income, in itself, if it was once filled?"

"My dear, perhaps it would. But do you think you could get Joe Pickering to do it? As long as the money in the bank lasts--I forget what it is, several thousand, more than twenty, I think-- we'll go along as we are. Joe has a half-interest in a patent, anyway, some sort of curtain-pole; it's always going to make us a fortune!"

"But, Billy, if you and the boy took a little place somewhere, and you had one good maid--up there on the pony farm, for instance-- surely it would be saner, surely it would be wiser, than trying to think of the stage now with him on your hands!"

"Except that I would simply die!" Billy said. "I love the city, and the excitement of not knowing what will turn up. And if Joe would behave himself, and if I should make a hit, why, we'll be all right."

A queer, hectic, unsatisfying life it must be, Rachael thought, saying good-bye to her guest a day or two later. Dressing, rouging, lacing, pinning on her outrageously expensive hats, jerking on her extravagant white gloves, drinking, rushing, screaming with laughter, screaming with anger, Billy was one of that large cla.s.s of women that the big city breeds, and that cannot live elsewhere than in the big city. She would ride in a thousand taxicabs, worrying as she watched the metre; she would drink a thousand gla.s.ses of champagne, wondering anxiously if Joe were to pay for it; she would gossip of a dozen successful actresses without the self-control to work for one-tenth of their success, and she would move through all the life of the theatres and hotels without ever having her place among them, and her share of their little glory. And almost as reckless in action as she was in speech, she would cling to the brink of the conventions, never quite a good woman, never quite anything else, a fond and loyal if a foolish and selfish mother, some day noisily informing her admirers that she actually had a boy in college, and enjoying their flattering disbelief. And so would disappear the last of the handsome fortune that poor Clarence's father had bequeathed to him, and Clarence's grandson must fight his way with no better start than his grandfather had had financially, and with an infinitely less useful brain and less reliable pair of hands.

Billy might be widowed or freed in some less unexceptionable way, and then Billy would marry again, and it would be a queer marriage; Rachael could read her fate in her character.

She wondered, walking slowly the short mile that lay between her house and the station, when Billy was gone, just how a discerning eye might read her own fate in her own character. Just what did the confused mixture of good motives and bad motives, erratic unselfishnesses and even more erratic weaknesses that was Rachael, deserve of Fate? She had bought some knowledge, but it had been dearly bought; she had bought some goodness, but at what a cost of pain!

"I don't believe that Warren ever did one-tenth the silly things we suspected him of!" Alice exclaimed one day. "I believe he was just an utter fool, and Magsie took advantage of it!"

Rachael did not answer, but there was no brightening of her sombre look. Her eyes, grave and sad, held for Alice no hope that she had come, as George and Alice had come, to a softer view of Warren's offence.

"I see him always as he was that last horrible morning," she said to Alice. "And I pray that I will never look upon his face again!"

And when presently Alice hinted that George was receiving an occasional letter from Warren, Rachael turned pale.

"Don't quote it to me, Alice," she said gently; "don't ask me to hear it. It's all over. I haven't a heart any more, just a void and a pain. You only hurt me--I can't ever be different. You and George love me, I know that. Don't drive me away. Don't ever feel that it will be different from what it is now. I--I wish him no ill, G.o.d knows, but--I can't. It wouldn't be happiness for me or for him. Please, PLEASE--!"

Alice, in tears, could only give her her way.

CHAPTER V

Upon the discontented musings of Miss Margaret Clay one hot September morning came Mrs. Joseph Pickering, very charming in coffee-colored madras, with an exquisite heron c.o.c.kade upon her narrow tan hat. Magsie was up, but not dressed, and was not ill pleased to have company. Her private as well as professional affairs were causing her much dissatisfaction of late, and she was at the moment in the act of addressing a letter to Warren, now on the ocean, from whom she had only this morning had an extremely disquieting letter.

Warren had come to see her the day before sailing, and with a grave determination new to their intercourse, had repeated several unpalatable truths. Rachael, on second thoughts, he told her, had absolutely refused him a divorce.

"But she can't do that! She wrote me herself--" Magsie had begun in anger. His distressed voice interrupted her.

"She's acting for the boys, Magsie. And she's right."

"Right!" The little actress turned pale as the full significance of his words and tone dawned upon her. "But--but what do you mean!

What about ME?"

To this Warren had only answered with an exquisitely uncomfortable look and the simple phrase, "Magsie, I'm sorry."

"You mean that you're not going to MAKE her keep her word?"

And again she had put an imperative little hand upon his arm, sure of her power to win him ultimately. Days afterward the angry blood came into her face when she remembered his kind, his almost fatherly, smile, as he dislodged the hand.

"Magsie, I'm sorry. You can't despise me as I despise myself, dear. I'm ashamed. Some day, perhaps, there'll be something I can do for you, and then you'll see by the way I do it that I want with all my heart to make it up to you. But I'm going away now, Magsie, and we mustn't see each other any more."

Magsie, repulsed, had flung herself the length of the little room.

"You DARE tell me that, Greg?"

"I'm sorry, Magsie!"

"Sorry!" Her tone was vitriol. "Why, but I've got your letters.

I've got your own words! Everyone knows-the whole world knows! Can you deny that you gave me this?--and this? Can you deny--"

"No, I'm not denying anything, Magsie. Except--that I never meant to hurt you. And I hope there was some happiness in it for you as there was for me."