Rachel," said Roddy. "You know she has
ghastly pain often and often."

"Yes. I'll give her that," said Rachel. "She's brave--brave as anything.
And after all," she added, "she couldn't affect me more if she were the
wittiest woman in the world----"

Roddy yawned--"Dam dull party," he said.

CHAPTER VII

RACHEL AND BRETON

"We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little farther: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
... but surely we are brave
Who make the Golden Journey to Samarcand."

_The Golden Journey to Samarcand._

JAMES ALROY FLECKER.

I

Rachel now awaited her meeting with Breton with restless impatience. It
should afford her, beyond everything, a solution. She was young enough
and inexperienced enough to make many demands upon life--that it should
be romantic, that it should, in the issues that it presented, be honest
and open and clear, that it should allow her to settle her own place in
it without any hurt to anyone else, that it should, in fact, arrange any
number of compromises to suit herself and that it should nevertheless be
so honest that it would admit of no compromises at all.

She approached life with all the reckless boldness of one who has never
come into direct contact with it. Neither her relations with her
grandmother nor with Roddy had as yet taken from her any of her youngest
nor simplest illusions. Were life drab and uninteresting, why, then one
turned simply to the place where it promised colour and adventure.

She had not yet discovered that when we go deliberately to grasp at
happiness we are eternally eluded.

But in spite of her desire for honesty she refused to face the actual
meeting with Breton. She knew him so slightly as Francis Breton and so
intimately as an idea. What she felt in her heart was, that her
grandmother had hoped to catch her by marrying her to Roddy and that
nothing could prove so eloquently that she had not been caught as her
friendship with Breton.

"I will show her and I will show Roddy that I am my own mistress, free
whatever they may say or do."

Breton--seen dimly as a rebel against a harsh dominating world--was the
figure of all romance and freedom. "Roddy doesn't care what happens to
me. He'll do anything grandmother tells him to...."

She was now out to attack the Beaminster fortress; she did not