"How's your mother, Greg?" she asked suddenly. "Fine," he answered, and with a swift smile for her he added, "and furious!" "No--is she really furious?" Rachael asked, paling. "Now, my dearest heart," Warren Gregory said with an air of authority that she found strangely thrilling and sweet, "from this moment on make up your mind that what my good mother does and says is absolutely unimportant to you and me! She has lived her life, she is old, and sick, and unreasonable, and whatever we did wouldn't please her, and whatever anyone does, doesn't satisfy her anyway! In forty years--in less than that, as far as I'm concerned--you and I'll be just as bad. My mother acted like a martyr on the steamer; she was about as gay with her old friends in London as you or I'd be at a funeral; she had an air of lofty endurance and forbearance all the way, and, as I said to Margaret Clay in Paris, the only time I really thought she was enjoying herself was when she had to be hustled into a hospital, and for a day or two there we really thought she was going to have pneumonia!" Rachael's delightful laugh rang out spontaneously from utter relief of heart. "Oh, Greg, you're delicious! Tell me about old Lady Frothingham, is she difficult, too? And how's pretty Magsie Clay?" "Now, if we're married to-morrow," the doctor Went on, too much absorbed in his topic to be lightly distracted. "But do you hear me, Ma'am? How does it sound?" "It sounds delicious! Go on!" "If we're married to-morrow, I say--it could be to-day just as well, but I suppose you girls have to buy clothes, and have your hands manicured, and so on--" "You know we do, to say nothing of lying awake all night talking about our beaux!" "Well"--he conceded it somewhat reluctantly--"then, to-morrow, some time before I go with Valentine to call for you, I'll go down to see my mother. She'll kiss me, and sigh, and feel martyred. In a month or two she'll call on me at the office. 'Why don't you and your wife come to see me, James?' 'Would you like us to, Mother? We fancied you were angry at us.' 'I am sorry, my son, of course, but I have never been angry. Will you come to-morrow night?' And when we go, my dear, you'd never dream that there was anything amiss, I assure you!" "I'll make her love me!" said Rachael, smiling tenderly. "Perhaps some day you'll have a very powerful argument," he said with a significant glance that brought the quick blood to her face. "Mother couldn't resist that!" She did not answer. It was a part of this new freshness and purity of aspect that she could not answer. "You asked about Margaret Clay," the doctor remembered presently. "She was the same old sixpence, only growing up now; she owns to nineteen--isn't she more than that? She always did romance and yarn so much about herself that you can't believe anything." "She's about twenty-one, perhaps no more than twenty," Rachael said, after some thought. "Did they say anything about Parker and Leila?"