dressing-rooms, passages, and nooks and corners generally. Yet Rachael's guest-rooms were models in their way, and when she gave a luncheon the women who came were always ready to exclaim in despairing admiration over the beauty of the gardens, the flower-filled, airy rooms, the table appointments, and the hostess herself.

But when they said that she was "wonderful"--and it was the inevitable word for Rachael Breckenridge-the general meaning went deeper than this. She was wonderful in her pride, the dignity and the silence of her attitude toward her husband; she had been a wonderful mother to Clarence's daughter; not a loving mother, perhaps--she was not loving to anyone--but a miracle of determination and clearness of vision.

Who else, her friends wondered, could have cleared the social horizon for Paula Breckenridge's daughter so effectively? With what brisk resoluteness the new mother had cut short the aimless European wanderings, cropped the child's artificially curled hair, given away the unsuitable silk stockings and the ridiculous frocks and hats. Billy, shorn and bewildered, had been brought home; had entered Miss Proctor's select school, entered Miss Roger's select dancing class, entered Professor Darling's expensive riding classes. Billy, in dark-blue Peter Thompsons, in black stockings and laced boots, had been dropped in among other little girls in Peter Thompsons and laced boots, little girls with the approved names of Whittaker and Bowditch, Moran and Merridew and Parmalee.

Billy had never doubted her stepmother's judgment; like all of the new Mrs. Breckenridge's friends, she was deeply, dumbly impressed with that lady's amazing efficiency. She had been a spoiled and discontented little rowdy. She became an entirely self-satisfied little gentlewoman. Clarence, jealously watching her progress, knew that Rachael was doing for his daughter far more than he could ever do himself.

But Rachael, if she had expected reward, reaped none. Her husband was a supremely selfish man, and his daughter inherited his sublime ability to protect his own pleasure at any cost. Carol admired her step-mother, but she was an indolent and luxury-loving little soul, and even as early as her twelfth or fourteenth year she had been deeply flattered by the evidences of her own power over her father. Into her youthful training no reverence for parents--real or adopted--had been infused; she called her father "Clancy," as some of his intimate friends called him, and he delighted to take her orders and bow to her pretty tyranny.

Before she was sixteen he began to take her about with him: to dances, to the theatre, and for long trips in his car. He entered eagerly into her young friendships, frantic to prove himself as young at heart as she. He paid her the extravagant compliments of a lover, and gave her her grandmother's beautiful jewelry, as well as every trinket that caught her eye.

And Billy accepted his attentions with a finished coquetry that was far from childlike, a flush on her satin cheek, a dimple puckering the corner of her mouth, and silky lashes lowered over her satisfied eyes. She was inevitably precocious in many ways, but she was young enough still to fancy herself one of the irresistible beauties and belles of the world, and to flaunt a perfectly conscious arrogance in the eyes of all other women.

All this was bewildering and painful to Rachael. She had never loved her husband--love entered into none of her relationships--her marriage had been only a step in the steady progress of her life toward the position she desired in the world. But she had liked him. She had liked his child, and she had come into the new arrangement kindly and gallantly determined to make the venture at least as profitable to them both as it was to her.

To be ignored, to be deliberately set aside, to be insulted by a selfishness so calculating and so deliberate as to make her own attitude seem all warmth and generosity by comparison, genuinely astonished her. At first, indeed, a sort of magnificent impatience had prevented her from feeling any stronger emotion than astonishment. It was too ridiculous, said the bride to herself tolerantly; it could not go on, of course, this preposterous consideration of a child of ten, this belittling consideration of her own place in the scheme as less Clarence's wife than Billy's mother. It must adjust itself with every week that they three lived together, the child slipping back to her own life, the husband and wife sharing theirs. When Clarence's first fears for his daughter's comfort under the new rule were set at rest, when his confidence in the wisdom and efficiency of his wife was fully established, then a normal relationship must ensue. "Surely Clarence wouldn't ask a woman to marry him just to give Billy a home and social backing?" Rachael asked herself, in those first puzzled days in Paris.

That was seven years ago. She knew exactly that for truth now. Long ago she had learned that whatever impulse had moved Clarence Breckenridge to ask her to marry him was quickly displaced by his vision of Billy's need as being greater than his own.

It had been an unpalatable revelation, for Rachael was a woman proud as well as beautiful. But presently she had accepted the situation as it stood, somehow fighting her way, as the years went by, to fresh acceptances: the acceptance of Billy's ripening charms, the acceptance of Clarence's more and more frequent times of inebriated irresponsibility. Silently she made her mental adjustments, moving through her gay and empty life in an unsuspected bitterness of solitude, won to protest and rebellion only when the cold surface she presented to the world was threatened from within or without.

It was distinctly threatened now, she realized with a little sick twist of apprehension at heart, when her casual inquiry to a maid upon entering was answered by a discreet, "Yes, Mrs. Breckenridge, Mr. Breckenridge came home half an hour ago. Alfred is with him."

This was unexpected. Rachael did not glance either at her guest or her stepdaughter, but she disposed of them both in a breath.

"Someone wants you on the telephone, Billy," she repeated after the maid's information. "Take it in the library. Run right up to my room, Elinor, and I'll be there in two minutes. I'll send some one in with towels and brushes; you've time for a tub. Take these things, Helda, and give them to Annie, and tell her to lookout for Miss Vanderwall."

The square entrance hall was sweet with flowers in the early spring evening, Oriental rugs were spread on the dull mirror of the floor, opened doors gave glimpses of airy colonial interiors, English chintzes crowded with gay colored fruits and flowers, brick fireplaces framed in classic white and showing a brave gleam of brass firedogs in the soft lamplight. Not a book on the long tables, not an etching on the dull rich paper of the walls, struck a false note. It was all exquisitely in tone.

But Rachael Breckenridge, at best, saw less its positive perfections than the tiniest opening through which an imperfection might push its way, and in such an hour as this she saw it not at all. Her mouth a trifle firm in its outline, her face a little pale, she went quickly up the wide white stairway and along the open balcony above. There were several doors on this balcony, which was indeed the upper hall. Mrs. Breckenridge opened one of them without knocking, and closed it noiselessly behind her.

The room into which she admitted herself presented exactly the picture she had expected. The curtains, again of richly colored cretonne, were drawn, a softly toned lamp on the reading table, and another beside the bed, cast circles of pleasant light on the comfortable wicker chairs, the cream-colored woodwork, and the scattered books and magazines. Several photographs of Carol, beautifully framed, were on bookcase and dresser, and a fine oil painting of the child at fourteen looked down from the mantel. On the bed, a mahogany four-poster, with carved pineapples finishing the posts, the