sly unoccupied day. On the other hand it was keeping Aunt
Lucile distractedly busy.

Was it the chance result of their preoccupation with other things that
she had been given no more intelligible account of it, or was it
something that all three of them, her father, Paula and Aunt Lucile, were
walking round the edge of? The nub of some seriously trivial quarrel? Was
that why Paula was so elaborately disengaged and Aunt Lucile so
portentous? Was it even perhaps why her father had so abruptly fled this
morning without coming into the house?

She treated this surmise kindly. It was something to think about anyhow;
something to sharpen her wits upon, just as a cat stretches her claws in
the nap of the drawing-room rug. She rescued from oblivion half a dozen
remarks heard during the morning, whose significance had gone over her
head, and tentatively fitted them together like bits of a picture puzzle.
She hadn't enough to go on but she believed there was something there.
And when a little later in the afternoon, she heard, along with a knock
on her door, her aunt asking if she might come in, she gave her an
enthusiastic welcome, scooped an armful of things out of a chair and
cleared a sitting space for herself at the foot of the bed.

"Would this blue thing do for to-night?" she asked, "or isn't it enough
of an affair? What sort of party is it anyhow?"

"Goodness knows," said Lucile. "Between your father and Paula I find it
rather upsetting."

Mary had reached out negligently for her cigarette case, lighted one and
letting it droop at a rather impossible angle, supported by the lightest
pressure of her lips so that the smoke crept up over her face into her
lashes and her hair, folded her hands demurely in her lap and waited for
her aunt to go on. She was mischievously half aware of the disturbing
effect of this sort of thing upon Lucile.

"What has there been between them?" Mary asked, when it became clear that
her aunt needed prompting. "Between father and Paula, I mean. Not a row?"

Mary never used language like this except provocatively. It worked on her
aunt as she had meant it to.

"There has been nothing between them," she said, "that requires a rowdy
word like that to express. It has not been even a quarrel. But they have
been for the last day or two, a little--at ..."

"Outs?" Mary suggested.

This had been the word on Lucile's tongue. "At cross purposes," she
amended and paused again. But Mary seeing that