angry eyes on her step-mother. Then her breast rose on a childish, dry sob, she dropped her eyes, and moved a shining slipper-toe upon the rug with the immortal motion of embarrassed youth.

"You--you used to like Joe, Rachael," she said, after a moment, in a low tone.

"I don't dislike him now," Rachael said composedly.

"He's awfully kind--and--and good, and Lucy never understood him, or tried to understand him!" said Billy in a burst. The other woman smiled.

"If Joe Pickering told you any sentimental nonsense like that, kindly don't retail it to me," she said amusedly.

In a second Billy was roused to utter fury. Her cheeks blazed, her breath came short and deep. "I hate you!" she said passionately, and ran from the room.

Mrs. Breckenridge sat still for a few moments, but there was no emotion but utter weariness visible in her face. After a while she said, "Oh, Lord!" in a tone compounded of amusement and disgust, and rising, she took a new book from the table, and went slowly downstairs.

In the lower hall Alfred met her, his fat young face duly mysterious and important in expression.

"Mr. Breckenridge got a telephone message from Doctor Jordan, Mrs. Breckenridge; the doctor's been called into town to a patient, so he can't see Mr. Breckenridge to-night."

"Oh! Well, he'll probably be here in the morning," Rachael said carelessly.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Breckenridge, but Mr. Breckenridge seemed to be a good deal worried about himself, and he had me call Doctor Gregory," the man pursued respectfully.

"Doctor GREGORY!" echoed his mistress, with a laugh like a wail. "Alfred, what were you THINKING of! Why didn't you call me?"

"He wouldn't have me call you," Alfred said unhappily. "He spoke to the doctor himself. We got the housekeeper first, and she said Doctor Gregory was dressing. 'Tell him it's a matter of life and death,' says Mr. Breckenridge. Then we got him. 'I'm dining out,' he says, 'but I'll be there this evening.'"

"Oh, dear, dear, dear!" Mrs. Breckenridge said half to herself in serio-comic desperation. "Gregory--called in for a--for a--for this! If I could get hold of him! He didn't say where he was dining?"

"No, Mrs. Breckenridge," the man answered, with a great air of efficiency.

"Well, Alfred, I wish sometimes you knew a little more--or a little less!" Rachael said dispassionately. "Light a fire in the library, will you? I'll have my dinner there. Tell Ellie to send me up something broiled--nothing messy--and some strong coffee."

CHAPTER II

The coffee was strong. Mrs. Breckenridge found it soothing to rasped nerves and tired body, and after the dinner things had been cleared away she sat on beside the library fire, under the soft arc of light from the library lamp, sipping the stimulating fluid, and staring at the snapping and flashing logs.

A sense of merely physical well-being crept through her body, and for a little time even her active brain was quieter; she forgot the man now heavily sleeping upstairs, the pretty little tyrant who had rushed off to dinner at the Chases', and the many perplexing elements in her own immediate problem. She saw only the quiet changes in the fire as yellow flame turned to blue--sank, rose, and sank again.

The house was still. Kitchenward, to be sure, there was a great deal of cheerful laughter and chatter, as Ellie, sitting heavily ensconced in the largest rocker, embroidered a centrepiece for her sister's birthday, Annie read fortunes in the teacups, Alfred imitated the supercilious manner of a lady who had called that afternoon upon Mrs. Breckenridge, and Helda, a milk-blond Dane with pink-rimmed eyes, laughed with infantile indiscrimination at everything, blushing an agonized scarlet whenever Alfred's admiring eye met her own.

But the kitchen was not within hearing distance of the quiet room where Rachael sat alone, and as the soft spring night wore on no sound came to disturb her revery. It was not the first solitary evening she had had of late, for Clarence had been more than usually reckless, and was developing in his wife, although she did not realize it herself, a habit of introspection quite foreign to her real nature.

She had never been a thoughtful woman, her days for many years had run brilliantly on the surface of life, she knew not whence the current was flowing, nor why, nor where it led her; she did not naturally analyze, nor dispute events. Only a few years ago she would have said that to an extraordinary degree fortune had been kind to her. She had been born with an adventurous spirit, she had played her game well and boldly, and, according to all the standards of her type, she had won. But sitting before this quiet fire, perhaps it occurred to her to wonder how it happened that there were no more hazards, no more cards left to play. She was caught in a net of circumstances too tight for her unravelling. Truly it might be cut, but when she stood in the loose wreckage of it--how should she use her freedom? If it was a cage, at least it was a comfortable cage; at least it was better than the howling darkness of the unfamiliar desert beyond.

And yet she raged, and her hurt spirit flung itself again and again at the bars. Young and beautiful and clever, how had life tricked her into this deadlock, where had been the fault, and whose?

For some undefined reason Rachael rarely thought of the past. She did not care to bring its certainties, its panorama of blinded eyes and closed doors before her mental vision. But to-night she found herself walking again in those old avenues; her thoughts went back to the memories of her girlhood.

Girlhood? Her eyes smiled, but with the smile a little twinge of bitterness drew down her mouth. What a discontented, eager, restless girlhood it had been, after all. A girlhood eternally analyzing, comparing, resenting, envying. How she had secretly despised the other girls, typical of their class, the laughing, flirting, dress-possessed girls of a small California town. How she had despised her aunts, all comfortably married and prosperous, her aunts' husbands, her stodgy, noisy cousins! And, for that matter, there had never been much reverence in her regard for her mother, although Rachael loved that complaining little woman in her cool way.

But for her father, the tall, clever, unhappy girl had a genuine admiration. She did not love him, no one who knew Gerald Fairfax well could possibly have sustained a deep affection for him, but she believed him to be almost as remarkably educated and naturally gifted as he believed himself to be. Her uncles were simply country merchants, her mother's fat, cheerful father dealt in furniture, and, incidentally, coffins, but her father was an Englishman, and naturally held himself above the ordinary folk of Los Lobos.

Nobody knew much about him, when he first made his appearance in Los Lobos, this silky-haired, round-faced, supercilious stranger, in his smart, shabby Norfolk coat, which was perhaps one reason why every girl in the village was at once willing to marry him, no questions asked. His speech was almost a different tongue from theirs; he was thirty-five, he had dogs and a man-servant, instead of the usual equipment of mother, sisters, and "hired girl," and he seemed eternally bored and ungracious. This was enough for the Los Lobos girls, and for most of their mothers, too.

The newcomer bought a small ranch, three miles out of town, and lounged about it in a highly edifying condition of elegant idleness. He rode a good horse, drank a great deal, and strode out of the post-office once a week scattering monogrammed envelopes carelessly behind him. He had not been long in town before people began to say that his elder brother was a lord; a duke, Mrs. Chess Baxter, the postmistress said, because to her question regarding the rumor he had answered carelessly: "Something of that sort."

Thirty years ago there were a great many detached Englishmen in