Doctor Gregory, as the lovely Mrs. Breckenridge packed her striped green and white ruffles trimly beside him, turned upon her a quick and affectionate smile. It asked no confidence, it expressed no sympathy, it was simply the satisfied glance of a man pleased with the moment and with the company in which he found himself. To Rachael, overwrought, nervous, and ashamed, no mood could have been more delicately tuned. She sank back against the deep upholstery luxuriously, and drew a long breath, inhaling the delicious air of early summer twilight. What a sweet, clean, solid sort of friend Greg was, thought Rachael, noticing the clever, well-groomed hands on the wheel, the kindly earnestness of the handsome, sun-browned face, the little wrinkle between the dark eyes that meant that Doctor Gregory was thinking.
"Straight home?" said he, giving her a smiling glance.
"If you please, Greg," Rachael answered, a sudden vision of the probable state of affairs at home causing her to end the words with a quick sigh.
Silence. They were running smoothly along the lovely country roads that were bowered so generously in fresh green that great feathery boughs of maple and locust brushed against the car. The birds were still now, and the sunlight gone, although all the world was still flooded with a soft golden light. The first dew had fallen, bringing forth from the dust a sweet and pungent odor.
"Thinking about what I said to you last night?" asked the doctor suddenly.
"I am afraid I am--a little," Rachael answered, meeting his quick side glance with another as fleet.
"And what do you think about it?" he asked. For answer Rachael only sighed wearily, and for a while they went on in silence. But when they had almost reached the Breckenridge gateway Doctor Gregory spoke again.
"Do you often have a scene like that one just now to get through?"
The color rushed into Rachael's face at his friendly, not too sympathetic, tone. She was still shaken from the encounter with Clarence, and still thrilling to the memory of her talk with Warren Gregory last night, and it was with some new quality of hesitation, almost of bewilderment, that she said:
"That--that wasn't anything unusual, Greg."