But over their late luncheon, in a roadside inn, the talk fell into deeper grooves, their letters, their loneliness, and their new plans, and when the car at last reached the traffic of the big bridge, and Rachael caught her first glimpse of the city under its thousand smoking chimneys, there had entered into their relationship a new sacred element, something infinitely tender and almost sad, a dependence upon each other, a oneness in which Rachael could get a foretaste of the exquisite communion so soon to be. They were spinning up the avenue, through a city humming with the first reviving breath of winter. They were at the great hotel, and Rachael was laughing in Elinor Vanderwall's embrace. The linen shop, the milliner, a dinner absurdly happy, and one of the new plays--a sunshiny morning when she and Elinor breakfasted in their rooms, and opened box after box of gowns and hats--the hours fled by like a dream. "Nervous, Rachael?" asked Miss Vanderwall of the vision that looked out from Rachael's mirror. "Not a bit!" the wife-to-be answered, feeling as she said it that her hands, busy with long gloves, were shaking, and her knees almost unready to support her. "It must be wonderful to marry a man like Greg," said the bridesmaid thoughtfully. "He simply IS everything and HAS everything--" "Ah, Elinor, it's wonderful to marry the man you love!" Rachael turned from the mirror, her blue eyes misted with tears under the brim of her wedding hat. "YOU!" Elinor smiled. "That I should live to see it! You--in love!" "And unashamed, and proud of it!" Rachael said with a tremulous laugh. "Are you all ready? Shall we go down?" She turned at the door and put one arm about her friend. "Kiss me, Elinor, and wish me joy," said she. "I don't have to!" asserted Miss Vanderwall, with a hearty kiss nevertheless, "for it will be your own fault entirely if there's ever the littlest, teeniest cloud in the sky!" END OF BOOK I BOOK II CHAPTER I Yet, even then, as Rachael Gregory admitted to herself months later, there had been a cloud in the sky--a cloud so tiny and so vague that for many days she had been able to banish it in the flooding sunshine all about her whenever it crossed her vision. But it was there, and after a while other tiny clouds came to bear it company, and to make a formidable shadow that all her philosophy could not drive away. Philosophy is not the bride's natural right; the honeymoon is a time of unreason; a crumpled rose-leaf in those first uncertain weeks may loom larger than all the far more serious storms of the years to come. Rachael, loving at last, was overwhelmed, intoxicated, carried beyond all sanity by the passion that possessed her.