o know. "Young and
downy and helpless, I suppose. With a look as if he was just about to
burst into tears. I met one like that last winter." She knew exactly how
to get results out of her aunt.

"He's not in the least like that! If he had been I should never have
brought him home, not even to tune the piano. He's quite a well behaved,
sensible-appearing young man, a little over thirty, I should say. And he
does speak nicely, though I think Paula exaggerates about that."

"Sensible or not, he's fallen wildly in love with her, of course," Mary
observed. "The more so they are the more instantaneously they do it."

But this lead was one Miss Wollaston absolutely declined to follow. "If
that clock's right," she exclaimed, gazing at a little traveling affair
Mary had brought home with her, "I haven't another minute." It was not
right, for it was still keeping New York time, but the diversion served.
"Wallace Hood spoke of coming in to see you about tea-time," she said
from the doorway. "I'm going to be to busy even to stop for a cup, so do
be down if you can."

CHAPTER V

JOHN MAKES A POINT OF IT

Mary was warmly touched by the thought of Wallace's coming to see her in
that special sort of way when he was certain of finding her at dinner an
hour or two later. Her feelings about him were rather mixed but he dated
back to the very earliest of her memories, and his kindly affectionate
attitude toward her had never failed, even during those periods when she
had treated him most detestably. Even as a little girl, she had been
aware of his sentimental attachment to her mother and perhaps in an
instinctive way had resented it, though her actual indictment against
Wallace in those days had always been that he made her naughty; incited
her by his perpetual assumption that she was the angelic little creature
she looked, to one desperate misdemeanor after another, for which her
father usually punished her. Mary had, superficially anyhow, her mother's
looks along with her father's temper.

But for two years after Mrs. Wollaston's death, she and Wallace had been
very good friends. She was grateful to him for treating her like a
grown-up, for talking to her, as he often did, about her mother and how
much she had meant to him. (She owed it, indeed, largely to Wallace that
her memories of this sentimental, romantic, passionless lady with whom in
life she had never been completely in sympathy, were as sweet and
satisfactory as