It was a good guess of Mary's that Paula had gone to borrow the twenty thousand dollars but it was to Wallace Hood, not to Martin Whitney, that she went for it; and thereby illustrated once more how much more effective instinct is than intelligence.

Martin, rich and generous as he was, originator as he was of the edict that Paula must go to work, would never have been stampeded as Wallace was in a talk that lasted less than half an hour, into producing securities to the amount that Paula needed and offering them up in escrow for the life of Maxfield Ware's contract.

Wallace was only moderately well off and he was by nature, cautious. His investments were always of the most conservative sort. This from habit as well as nature because his job—the only one he had ever had—was that of estate agent. But Paula's instinct told her that he wouldn't find it possible to refuse. I think it told her too, though this was a voice that did not make itself fairly heard to her conscious ear, that he would be made very fluttered and unhappy by it whether he granted her request or not.

What he would hate, she perceived, was the suddenness of the demand and the irrevocable committal to those five years; the blow it was to those domesticities and proprieties he loved so much. The fact that he would be made sponsor for those unchartered excursions to Mexico, to South America, and so on, under the direction of a libidinous looking cosmopolite like Maxfield Ware.

Why she wanted to put Wallace into the flutters she couldn't have told. She was, as I say, not quite aware that she did. But he had been running up a score in very minute items that was all of five years old. The fact that all these items went by the name of services, helpful little acts of kindness, made the irritation they caused her all the more acute.

I don't agree with Lucile Wollaston's diagnosis, that Paula could not abide Wallace merely because he refused to lose his head over her, but there was a grain of truth in it. What she unconsciously resented was the fundamental unreality of his attitude to her. Actually, he did not like her, but the relation he had selected as appropriate to the first Mrs. Wollaston's successor was one of innocent devotion and he stuck, indefatigably, to the pose. So the chance to put his serviceability to the proof in consternating circumstances like these, afforded her a subtle satisfaction. He'd brought it upon himself, hadn't he? At least it was he and no other who had put Mary up to the part she had played.

None of this, of course, came to the surface at all in the scene between them. She was gentler than was her wont with him, very appealing, subdued nearer to his own scale of manners than he had ever seen her before. But she did not, for a fact, allow him much time to think.

He asked her, with a touch of embarrassment, whether John was fully in her confidence concerning this startling project, and if she had won his assent to it.

"He knows all about it," she said—and with no consciousness of a suppressio veri here. "We hardly talked of anything else all last night. I didn't get to sleep till four. He doesn't like it, but then you couldn't expect he would. For that matter neither do I. Oh, you don't know how I hate it! But I think he sees it has to be. Anyhow, he didn't try very hard to keep me from going on with it—And Mary, of course, is perfectly satisfied."

Even his not very alert ear caught something equivocal in those last sentences, and he looked at her sharply.

"Oh, I'm worn to ribbons over it!" she exclaimed, and this touch of apology served for the tearing edge there had been in her voice. "I couldn't let him see how I feel about it. It would be a sort of relief to have it settled. That's why I came straight to you to-day."

He tried, but rather feebly, to temporize. We mustn't let haste drive us farther than we really wanted to go. The matter of drawing the formal contract, for instance, must be attended with all possible legal safe-guards, especially when we were dealing with a person whose honor was perhaps dubitable.

"I thought we might go round to see Rodney Aldrich about it, now," she said. "He's about the best there is in that line, isn't he? Why don't you telephone to his office and find out if he's there."

This seemed as good a straw as any to clutch at. The chance of catching as busy a man as Aldrich with a leisure half hour was very slim. The recording angel who guarded his wicket gate would probably give them an appointment for some day next week, and this would leave time for a confirmatory talk with John. But, unluckily, Rodney was there and would be glad to see Mrs. Wollaston as soon as she could be brought round.

"Then, that's all right," Paula said with a sigh of relief. "So if you really believe I'll keep my word and don't mind putting up the money for me, it's as good as settled."

There was one more question on his tongue. "Does John know that you have come to me for it?" But this, somehow, he could not force himself to ask. Implicitly she had already answered it—hadn't she?

"Of course I believe, in you, in everything, my dear Paula. And I'm very much—touched, that you should have come to me. And my only hope is that it may turn out to have been altogether for the best."

And there was that.

It was not until late that night that his misgivings as to the part Mary might have played in this drama really awoke, but when they did he marveled that they had not occurred to him earlier. He recalled that Mary had prophesied during their talk at the Saddle and Cycle that Paula would attribute to her the suggestion—whoever might make it—that an operatic career for John's wife was desirable and necessary for financial reasons. She had said too, in that serious measured way of hers, "If Paula ever saw me coming between her and father, whether it was my doing or not, she would hate me with her whole heart."

Had that prediction been justified? There were half a dozen phrases that Paula had allowed herself to use this afternoon, which added up to a reasonable certainty that it was altogether justified. It was not easy for him to admit to himself that he didn't like Paula; that he knew her and had long known her for a person incapable of following any lead save that of her own primitive straightforward desires.

His self-communings reached down deeper into him than they had done for many a long year. He convicted himself, before his vigil was over, of flagrant cowardice in having allowed Mary to undertake the burden of that revelation. What harm would it have done any one, even himself, beyond an hour's discomfort, to have drawn down Paula's lightnings on his own head? Her enmity, even though it were permanent, could not seriously have changed the tenor of his ways.

But to Mary, such a thing could easily be a first-class disaster. Could John be relied upon to come whole-heartedly to her defense. No, he could not. Indeed—this was the thought that made Wallace gasp as from a dash of cold water in the face—John's anger at this interference with his affairs and at the innocent agent of it was likely to be as hot as his wife's. Momentarily anyhow. What a perfectly horrible situation to have forced the girl into;—that fragile sensitive young thing!

And now above all other times, when, for some reason not fully known to him, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing to manage. He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how she had flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tense emotion if he couldn't find her a job. It had been that very night, hadn't it?—when Paula had given that recital of Anthony March's songs—that she had disappeared out of the midst of things and never come back during the whole evening. When one considered her courage a flight like that told a good deal.

Then there had been that something a little short of an engagement with Graham Stannard, which must have distressed her horribly;—any one with a spirit as candid as hers and with as honest a hatred of all that was equivocal. The family had seemed to think that it would all come out right in the end somehow, yet the last time she had talked with him she had said, cutting straight through the disguise his thought had hidden itself behind, "I know I can't ever marry Graham."

And it was a young girl harassed with perplexities like these, whom he had permitted in his stead to beard the lioness. Well, if there was anything in the world, any conceivable thing, that he could do to repair the consequences of his fault, he would do it. If that lovers' misunderstanding with Graham could, after all, be cleared away it would be the happy, the completely desirable solution of the problem. But if it could not … A day-dream that it was he who stood in Graham Stannard's shoes, offering her harbor and rest and a life-long loyalty, formed the bridge over which he finally fell asleep.

She called him to the telephone the next morning while he was at breakfast; just to tell him she was in town, she said, and to ask him if he had heard anything from his sister in Omaha as to whether she wanted a nursery governess. He had to admit, of course, that he had not even written to her, and felt guiltier and more miserable than ever.

"Do write to-day, though, won't you?" she urged. "And give me the best character you can. Because I am going to get some sort of job just as soon as possible."

In reply to the inarticulate noise of protest he made at this she went on, "Our family has simply exploded. I fled for my life last night. So you see I'm really in earnest about going to work now."

"I want to come and see you at once," he said. "Where are you?"

"At home," she answered, "but I'm going out this minute for the day. If you'd like a picnic tea here at half past five, though, come and I'll tell you what I've been doing."

He asked if this meant that she was staying all by herself in the Dearborn Avenue house without even a servant, and at his lively horror over this she laughed with an amusement which sounded genuine enough to reassure him somewhat. She ended the conversation by telling him that she had left her father with the impression that she was going straight to Hickory Hill. She was writing Aunt Lucile a note saying she meant to stay in town for a few days. "But if you get any frantic telephone calls in the meantime, tell them I'm all right."

He wondered a good deal, as his hours marched past in their accustomed uneventful manner, what she could be doing with hers. It was an odd locution for her to have employed that she was "going out for the day." He couldn't square it with any sort of social activity. The thing that kept plaguing his mind despite his impatient attempts to dismiss it as nonsense, was the possibility that she was actually looking for that job she'd talked about. Answering advertisements!

Toward four, when he had stopped trying to do anything but wait for his appointment with her, Rush and Graham came in, precipitately, and asked for a private talk with him. He took them into his inner office, relieved a little at the arrival of reenforcements but disappointed too.

"If you're anxious about Mary," he began by saying, "I can assure you that she is all right. She's at the Dearborn Avenue house, or was last night and will be again later this afternoon. I talked to her on the phone this morning."

"Thank God!" said Rush.

Graham dropped into a chair with a gesture of relief even more expressive.

Rush explained the cause of their alarm. Old Pete had driven in to Hickory Hill around two o'clock with a letter, addressed to Mary, from Paula, and on being asked to explain offered the disquieting information that she had left Ravinia for the farm, the afternoon before. They had driven straight to town and to Wallace as the likeliest source of information.

In the emotional back-lash from his profound disquiet about his sister, suddenly reassured that there was nothing—well, tragic to be apprehended, Rush allowed himself an outburst of brotherly indignation. He'd like to know what the devil Mary meant by giving them a fright like that. Why hadn't she telephoned last night? Nothing was easier than that. Or more to the point still, why hadn't she come straight out to the farm as she had told her father she meant to do, instead of spending the night in town?

Wallace would have let him go on, since it gave him a little time he wanted for deciding what line to take. But Graham, it seemed, couldn't stand it.

"Shut up, Rush!" he commanded. (You are to remember that he was three years his partner's senior.) "Mary never did an—inconsiderate thing in her life. If she seems to have forgotten about us, you can be dead sure there's a reason."

"I agree with Stannard," Wallace put in, "that she wants to be dealt with—gently. She must have been having a rather rotten time."

He hadn't yet made up his mind how far to take them into his confidence as to what he knew and guessed, but Rush made an end of his hesitation.

"Tell us, for heaven's sake, what it's all about.—Oh, you needn't mind Graham. He's as much in it as any of us. I suppose you know how he stands."

Wallace was conscious of an acute wish that they had not turned up until he'd had a chance to see Mary, but somehow he felt he couldn't go behind an assurance like that. So he told them what he had pieced together.

Rush grunted and blushed and said he'd be damned, but it was not a theme—this contention between his father and his stepmother—that he could dwell upon. He got hold at last of something that he could be articulate about, and demanded to know why, in these circumstances, Mary hadn't come straight to them at Hickory Hill instead of camping out, for the night, all by herself in the Dearborn Avenue house.

"She has an idea she must find a job for herself," Wallace said, feeling awkwardly guilty as if he had betrayed her; but the way Rush leaped upon him, demanding in one breath what the deuce he meant and what sort of job he was talking about, made it impossible to pull up.

He recounted the request Mary had made of him, concerning his sister in Omaha, and, last of all, stated his own misgiving—nothing but the merest guess of course—that she had been putting in this day answering advertisements. "She said she'd give me a picnic tea at five-thirty and tell me what she'd been doing."

"Well, it'll be no picnic for her," Rush exploded angrily. "I'll see her at five-thirty myself. She must be plumb out of her head if she thinks she'll be allowed to do a thing like that."

Once more, before Wallace could speak, it was Graham who intervened. "I want you to leave this to me," he said gravely. "I don't know whether I can settle it or not, but I'd like to try." He turned to Wallace. "Would you mind, sir, letting me go to tea with her at half past five in your place?"

It is possible that, but for Wallace's day-dream of himself offering Mary the shelter and the care she so obviously needed, he might have persisted in seeing her first and assuring her that he was to be regarded as an ally whatever she decided to do. Her voice as she had said, "I know I can never marry Graham" echoed forlornly in his mind's ear. But a doubt faint and vague as it was, of his own disinterestedness held him back. Graham was young; he was in love with her. That gave him right of way, didn't it?

So he assented. It was agreed that Rush should dine with Wallace at his apartment. Graham, if he had any news for them should communicate it by telephone. Instantly!