her father but was aware that he was fixedly
not looking at her.

"I don't know whether I am going to stay or not," she said casually
enough. "There isn't any particular reason why I should, unless I can
find something to do. You haven't a job for me, have you?"

"A job?" Wallace gasped.

"In your office," she explained. "Filing and typing, or running the
mimeograph. It seems to be a choice between something like that
and--millinery."

"That's an extravagant idea," her father said, trying for, but not quite
able to manage, a tone that matched hers. "Good lord, Wallace, don't sit
there looking as if you thought she meant it!"

"You do look perfectly--consternated," she said with a pretty good laugh.
"Never mind; I shan't do anything outrageous for a week or two. Oh, here
they come. Will you ring, dad? I want some more hot water."

Rush came into the drawing-room alone, Paula having lingered a moment,
probably before the mirror in the hall. Mere professional instinct for
arranging entrances for herself, Mary surmised this to be. And she may
have been right for Paula was not one of those women who are forever
making minute readjustments before a glass. But when she came in, just
after Wallace Hood had accomplished his welcome of the returned soldier,
it was hard to believe that she was concerned about the effect she
produced upon the group about the tea-table. She didn't, indeed,
altogether join it, gave them a collective nod of greeting with a faint
but special smile for her husband on the end of it and then deliberately
seated herself with a "No, don't bother; this is all right," at the end
of the little sofa that stood in the curve of the grand piano, rather in
the background.

When Mary asked her how she wanted her tea, she said she didn't think
she'd have any; and certainly no cakes. No, not even one of Wallace's
candied strawberries. There was an exchange of glances between her and
Rush over this.

"They have been having tea by themselves, those two," Mary remarked.

"No," said Rush, "not what you could call tea."

Paula smiled vaguely but didn't throw the ball back, did not happen, it
appeared, to care to talk about anything. Presently the chatter among the
rest of them renewed itself.

Only it would have amused an invisible spectator to note how those three
Wollastons, blonde, dolichocephalic, high-strung, magnetically
susceptible, responded, as strips of gold-leaf to the static electricity
about a we