y?"

She couldn't inform him as to that and by way of getting him to come to
anchor, offered him his tea.

"Oh, I'll wait for the others," he said. "They can't be much later than
this.--I'm glad she's taken a vacation from those songs," he went on
presently from the fireplace. "She told me last night she'd been working
all day with Novelli over them. Only sent him home about half an hour
before it was time for her to dress for dinner. Do you suppose,"--this to
Wallace--"that they're as wonderful as she thinks they are?"

It was obvious to Mary that Hood's reply was calculated to soothe; his
attitude was indulgent. He talked to Mary about March as just another of
Paula's delightful extravagances. March's indignant refusal, at first, to
tune the Circassian grand, his trick of sitting on the floor under
Paula's piano while she played for him, his forgetting to be paid, though
he had not, in all probability, a cent in his pockets, were exhibited as
whimsicalities, such as Wallace's favorite author, J.M. Barrie, might
have invented. It was just like Paula to take him up as she had done, to
work away for days at his songs, proclaiming the wonder of them all the
while. "We're all hoping, of course," he concluded, "that when she's
finished with them to-night, she'll sing us some of the old familiar
music we really love."

The neat finality of all this, produced, momentarily, the effect of
ranging Mary on the other side, with Paula and her musician. But just at
this point, she lost her character of disinterested spectator, for
Wallace, having put March back in his box and laid him deliberately on
the shelf, abruptly produced, by way of diversion, another piece of goods
altogether.

"I hope Mary's come home to stay," he said to John. "We can't let her go
away again, can we?"

Afterward, she was able to see that it was a natural enough thing for him
to have said. It would never have occurred to him, pleasant, harmless
sentimentalist that he was, that John's second marriage might be a
disturbing factor in his relation with Mary and that the question so
cheerfully asked as an escape from the more serious matter that he had
been talking about, struck straight into a ganglion of nerves.

But at the time, no such excuse for him presented itself. She stared for
a moment, breathless, paled a little and locked her teeth so that they
shouldn't chatter; then, a wave of bright anger relaxed her stiffened
muscles. She did not look at