There followed the conclusion of the story, an interval of ease. It gave March, to begin with, a new access of courage, almost of confidence, to note that she did not fade white again and that the sick look of horror, banished from her eyes by the mere intensity of her determination to convey the whole truth to him, did not return to them. She substituted her other hand for the one he held in order to shift her position a little and lean against his knees.

Her mind had not detached itself from the story as she made evident by the reflective way in which she went on thinking aloud about it; dwelling on some of the curious consequences of the adventure. It was surprising—she wondered if it indicated anything really abnormal in her—the way she had felt about it afterward.

She'd felt nothing in the least like shame. Certainly not at first. On the contrary, she'd taken a deep soul-satisfying pride in it, a kind of warm sense of readiness for anything.

She told him with a little clutch of embarrassment and resolution, about another incident that happened somewhat later, attributing an importance to it which he conceded while he reflected with a smile that most people, men and women virtuous or otherwise, would have regarded as ridiculously disproportionate. The incident concerned a man whom she didn't much like, she said, but found somehow, fascinating. He had been paying her attentions of a rather experimental sort for weeks, maneuvering, arranging. He knew she lived by herself and had been angling for an invitation to come to see her, alone. Finally, he telephoned her office one day and asked point-blank if he mightn't come to tea that afternoon. She said he might without telling him that she was expecting Christabel Baldwin at the same time. An hour later, a restless hour it had been, she had telephoned Christabel and put her off so that when her other guest came he found just what he had expected. In the manner of one sure of his welcome and intent on wasting no time, he had begun making love to her (she apologized for the employment of that phrase but said she knew no other that was usable). She admitted that she had never had any real doubt that this was what he had meant to do and conceded him the right to think that she had invited it. But she found it, nevertheless, unendurable. She felt unspeakably degraded by it and presently flew into a rage and turned the man out of the house, feeling, she added, as much ashamed of that part of the performance as of anything else.

This encounter, she told March, made a profound change in her feeling about the other episode—closed a door upon it. Nothing like that could happen to her again. She simply stopped thinking about it after that, buried it and it had stayed buried comfortably for the better part of a year, until Rush came home from France. At least she wasn't aware that it had troubled her. The twinges of discomfort she'd felt whenever she'd faced the prospect of coming home, she had attributed to another cause altogether.

"Paula," he observed. "That's easy enough to see."

"Oh, you are a comfort," she said; "only not Paula by herself. Paula and father and I, in a sort of awkward triangle, all doing our best and all nagging one another. That has got terribly worse in the last few days."

She seemed to find no difficulty at all in informing him fully about this home situation; needed only a question or surmise dropped here and there to develop the whole story.

It wasn't a chronological narrative. Her mind drifted like a soaring kingfisher over the whole area between her childhood and the events of this very morning, swooping down here or there to pick up some incident wherever a gleam of memory attracted her.

Her spirit was finding compensation for the agonies of the past hours in a complete detachment. Nothing she told him, no matter how close home it came, seemed to involve any painful emotion. Her body, pressed so close against his that he could have felt the faintest muscle quiver, conveyed no message to him but the relaxation of complete security.

About himself there was a curious duality. One of him was lulled irresistibly into sharing her mood of serene detachment. The other, recognizing the transitoriness of hers, knowing that when this interlude came to an end, as come it must, the storm would break upon them once more, was casting about desperately for the means of saving her.

He had come to see the situation with her own eyes, fairly felt the clutch of it upon his own heart. She or some impish power acting through her agency had certainly made a mess of things. Her father's happiness destroyed; Rush's partnership broken; and the whole Hickory Hill project ruined unless some one could be found to buy into it in Graham's place; Graham humiliated, utterly cast adrift, irreparably hurt. And the prospect for the future….

She had told him of her tramp about the streets yesterday with her newspaper clipping and he was able to feel the full terror of it; and, beyond the terror, the gray emptiness.

There was only one way out of the tangle and this was to marry the man she loved and knew loved her. Well, he knew with merciless certainty what her answer would be when he asked her—begged her—to do that. He had provided her with the answer himself, with his sophomoric talk about traveling light and refusing to wear harness. And he'd worse than talked. His flight from her at Hickory Hill was enough to show that these weren't mere empty phrases. And yet her life depended to-night upon his ability to persuade her, in the face of those phrases and that fact, to marry him. So he sat very still, wondering how soon she would divine these undercurrents of his thought, listening while she talked to him.

The hours were slipping away, too. A glance at the watch braceleted upon the wrist he held startled him and he covered it with his hand. Had they already, he wondered, begun a search for her? Her words supplied presently the answer to that question. She was talking, with a dry sort of humor, about the commotions of that day.

He could not be sure he was getting it quite straight, for she was commenting upon events rather than narrating them. Apparently she had telephoned to her brother at Hood's apartment immediately after young Stannard left the house the evening or afternoon before, telling him not to bother about her, as she was going straight to bed. Let him go to a show and be careful not to wake her when he came in. She'd done this and gone to sleep at once, not waking until she'd heard him getting ready for bed in the adjoining room. But after that she hadn't been able to get off again.

March reflected, with a shudder, what a ghastly procession of hours those must have been. Had it been then, he wondered, that, looking for some harmless thing to help her sleep, she had come upon the deadlier stuff?

Her encounter with her brother at breakfast, which she had prepared, was their first, it seemed, since her visit to Hickory Hill and Rush had been shocked at her wan, lifeless appearance. He'd guessed, of course, that his friend's suit hadn't prospered and now took the line, which no doubt seemed to him the most tactful and comforting one available, that she was too ill to attempt any final decision on such a subject just now and that things would look different when better health had driven morbid thoughts away.

Her vehemence in trying to convince him that she had acted finally in the matter, that Graham now acquiesced fully in her decision and no longer wanted to marry her, and that Rush must let him alone—not even try to talk with him about it—had only made him the more confident in his diagnosis.

It must have been pat in the middle of this scene that Graham's midnight-written letter arrived. Rush's attitude toward his partner's flight—after the first moments of mere incredulity—had been one of contemptuous irritation, the natural attitude for any young man who sees a comrade taking no more of a matter than a disappointment in love with an evident lack of fortitude. This was heightened, too, by a rapidly developed sense of personal grievance. What the devil did Graham think was going to happen to him with Hickory Hill left on his hands like that? There was more than enough work for the two of them. And then the financial aspect of it! Mr. Stannard, who had just been brought to the point of loosening up and letting them have a little more money, would of course leave Rush to his fate. If he didn't call his loans and sell him out! Ruin them altogether! Graham must simply be found and dragged back before his father learned of his flight.

He couldn't have been paying his sister much attention while he ran on like that! Unwisely, perhaps, but inevitably, Mary attempted to defend the fugitive—in the only way she thought of as possible; namely, by showing her brother what the true situation was.

She didn't try to tell March what she said. The thing which, with a forlorn smile, she dwelt upon, was the terrified vehemence with which Rush had stopped her at his first inkling of what she was trying to make him see. She was simply out of her head. A bad case, he pronounced, of neurasthenia. Her having set out yesterday to find a job should have made that plain enough. What she needed was a nurse and a doctor—and he meant to provide both within the next few hours. He then compromised by saying that the nurse he had in mind was for the moment Aunt Lucile and the doctor their father.

With an alternation of truculence and cajolery, he had got her to lie down and to promise not to talk—that was the important thing—and this accomplished he devoted half an hour to the composition of a note to Miss Wollaston (whom it was difficult to tell anything to over the telephone, particularly with long distance rural connections) which he despatched, in charge of Pete, in the big car. Pete would get back with her by three at the latest.

Rush then had a long talk by telephone with his father at Ravinia. Mary didn't know, of course, what they had said, beyond that John had promised to come down immediately after lunch, but she got the idea that the professional medical attitude had been one of less alarm than the amateur one. Mary confessed to March, with a flicker of ironic amusement, that she had supported this lighter view so successfully that, a little before noon, Rush had confided to her his wish—if she were perfectly sure she didn't need him—to take the one o'clock train to Lake Geneva. He and Graham were still expected there for the week-end and on a good many accounts it would be well if he didn't fail them. He dreaded going, of course, but he felt he could meet the situation better on the ground whatever turned up. He could wait for the three o'clock train, but this was the one Mr. Stannard always took and he'd like to get in a talk with Sylvia first. She was a great pal of her brother's and might well have some real information about He'd have Pete's wife come in and look after Mary—get lunch and so on. And father would be down about two.

March thought the forlorn smile with which she told him this the most heart-breaking thing he had ever seen. Damn Rush! Damn all the sentimentalists in the world. Dressing up their desires in altruistic clothes. Loving themselves in a lot of crooked mirrors!

The rest of the story told itself in very few words. John Wollaston telephoned, about three, from Ravinia, to say that Paula wasn't well—meant to sing to-night as she was billed to do (she took great pride in never disappointing her audiences)—but very much wanted him at hand through the ordeal. If Mary was feeling as much better as her voice sounded would she mind his not coming until to-morrow morning.

She'd assured him, of course, that she wouldn't mind a bit. Aunt Lucile hadn't arrived yet but she would be coming any minute now. Rush had been making a great fuss about nothing, anyway. She did not volunteer the information that Rush had already gone to Lake Geneva.

At five o'clock a telegram, addressed to Rush, had come from Miss Wollaston. Pete had broken one of the springs of the big car and had had to go to Durham for another. She hoped Rush and his father would be able to take care of Mary until to-morrow morning when she would arrive with one of the servants and take charge.

That cleared the board. To-morrow they would descend upon her with their fussy attentions, their medical solemnities, their farcical search for something—for anything except the truth they wouldn't let her tell—to account for her nervous breakdown. But for a dozen hours she was, miraculously, to be let alone, with blessed open spaces round her. No need for any frantic haste. Plenty of time. The whole of that hot still summer night.

And then, at six o'clock, a man named James Wallace had telephoned! And
Jennie MacArthur had decided to drop in that evening for a visit with
Sarah! Fate had played its part; given March his chance.

"So that's why you decided to go away," he said.

He had been nerving himself during a long slow silence for that. He could almost as easily have struck her a blow, and indeed the effect of it was precisely that. But though she tried to shrink away he held her tighter and went on. "I don't believe there's anything in the whole picture now that I don't see and understand. But—but the way out … Oh, Mary darling, it isn't the one you are trying to take. There's happiness for both of us if you'll take the other way—with me."

She was struggling now to get free from his hands. "No!" she gasped wildly. "I won't do that. I'll do anything—anything else rather than that. Let me go now."

But he held her fast. Presently she relaxed and lay back panting in her chair. "Won't you please let me go?" she pleaded. "You haven't understood at all if you don't see that you must. Oh, but you do understand! You've comforted me … I didn't think there could be any comfort like that. Let me go now—in peace. Don't ask the other. I've spoiled things for everybody else, but I won't for you. I couldn't endure that."

All the pleas, the arguments, the convincing phrases which he had been mustering while she talked to him so contentedly, to convince her of the truth, the blinding truth that he wanted her now for his wife, that life no longer seemed a possible thing for him upon any other terms—all that feeble scaffolding of words was, to his despair, swept now clean away in the very torrent of his passion. He could do nothing for a while but go on holding her. At last, words burst from him.

"I won't let you go. Not alone. Wherever you go, I'll go with you."

She looked up, staring into his face and he saw an incredulous surmise deepen into certainty. She had seen, heard in that cry of his, the truth—that he understood what she meant to do. Then her face contorted itself like a child's, ineffectually struggling to keep back tears, and she broke down, weeping.

That broke the spell that had fallen upon him. He took her up, carried her over to the big armchair and sat down with her in his arms.

His own terror, which had never more than momentarily receded since she had first spoken to him from the doorway, was, he realized, gone; replaced by an inexplicable thrilling confidence that he had won his victory. He didn't speak a word.

The tempest was soon spent. It was a matter only of minutes before the sobbing ceased. But for a long while after she was quiet, all muscles relaxed, she lay just as he held her, a soft dead weight like a sleeping child. He wondered, indeed, if she had not fallen asleep and finally moved his head so that he could see her eyes. They were open, though, and at that movement of his she stirred, sighed and sat erect.

"I think I would have dropped off in another minute," she said. Then she put her hands upon his shoulders. "I won't do that. I promise, solemnly, I won't do what—what we both thought I meant to do. I don't believe I could now, anyway. Now that the nightmare is gone."

She smiled then and bent down and kissed him. "But I won't do the other thing either, my dear. I'll find some other way. Really go to Omaha perhaps. But I won't marry you. You see why, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "I can tell you exactly why. You don't want to take away my freedom. You want me to be a sort of—what was that opera you spoke about at Hickory Hill?—Chemineau. Doing nothing but what I please. Wandering off wherever I like." He smiled. "Mary, dear, do you realize that you're proposing to deal with me exactly as Graham Stannard would have dealt with you? Trying to make an image of me?"

She started from his knees, retreated a pace or two and turned and confronted him.

"That's not true," she protested. "That can't possibly be true!"

He did not answer. He had plenty of arguments with which to establish the parallel, his mind was aflame with phrases in which to plead his cause with her. Somehow they wouldn't come to his tongue. It didn't occur to him that fatigue had anything to do with this. He was filled with a sudden fury that he could not talk to her.

She had turned away, restlessly, and moved to one of the dormer windows.
Following her with his eyes he saw the dawn coming.

He rose stiffly from his chair. "I guess I had better take you home now," he said.

She nodded and got her hat. When he found her at the door after he had put out the lamp she clung to him for a moment in the dark and he thought she meant to speak, but she did not.

He helped her down the irregular shaky stair and then, along the gray cool empty street he walked with her toward the brightened sky.

She said, at last, "Graham wouldn't let me tell him what the real me was like. Tell me the truth about the real you."

"There isn't much to tell. I guess I'm pretty much like any one else when it comes down to—to … I don't want to go on, alone. I want to be woven in with you. I want…"

He stood still in a vain effort to make the words come. "I can't talk!" he cried, and his voice broke in a sob.

"You needn't," she said; and pressing his hand against her breast she led him on again. She was trembling and her hand was cold.

Nothing more was said between them, all the way. But when they reached her door and managed to open it she stood for a moment peering through the dusk into his face.

"If it's true…" she said. "If you really want a home and a wife—like me… Oh, yes, I know it's true!"