foreign woman--_you_
know"--or "Fancy Shorty Monmouth being at Cowes after all this year--you
know we heard----"

Rachel had been having a wonderful time--that was the great fact that
ran, up and down, through her dozing thoughts. Yes, a wonderful time. It
was surely, now, a century ago, that strange period when she had
dreaded, so terribly, her plunge.

That day, after her visit to the Bond Street gallery, when it had all
seemed simply more than she could possibly encounter, those talks with
May Eversley (who, by the way, had just announced herself as engaged to
a middle-aged baronet) when the world had frowned down from a vast,
incredible height upon a miserably terrified midget. Why! the absurdity
of it! It had all been as easy, simply as easy as though she had been
plunged in the very heart of it all her life.

Followed there swiftly upon that the knowledge that Roddy Seddon was to
be, for this same week-end, at Lady Massiter's. Rachel did not pretend
that, ever since that _Meistersinger_ night at the opera she had not
known of his attentions to her--impossible to avoid them had she wished,
impossible to pretend ignorance of the meaning that his inarticulate
sentences had, of late, conveyed, impossible to mistake the laughing
hints and suggestions of May and the others.

She did not know what answer she would give did he ask her to marry him.
At that concrete suggestion her doze left her and, sitting up, staring
out at the wonderful day into whose heart muffled lights were now
creeping, she asked herself what, indeed, was her real thought of him.

He was to her as were Uncle John and Dr. Christopher--safe, kind,
simple. He appealed to everything in her that longed for life to be
clear, comfortable, without danger. She loved his happiness in all
out-of-door things--horses and dogs and fields and his little place in
Sussex. Ever since that visit to Uncle Richard's fans she had suspected
him of other appreciations and enthusiasms, perhaps she might in time
encourage those hidden things in him.

Above all did she find him true, straight, honest. Lies, little
mannerisms, disguises, these were not in him, he was as clear to her as
a mirror, she would trust him beyond anyone she knew.

He did not touch in any part of him that other secret, wild, unreal
life of hers, and indeed that was, in him, the most reassuring thing of
all.

The Rachel who was in rebellion, to whom everything of her London life,
everything Be