He said it would take a lot of money, of
course, but he thought he could manage my share."

Mary relaxed just perceptibly deeper in the pillows and her eyelids
drooped again. "It's getting awfully late," Rush said; "don't you want to
go to sleep?" But he needed no urging to go on when she asked him to tell
her all about it, and for another half hour he elaborated the plan.

He was still breezing along on the full tide of the idea, when,
happening to glance at her little traveling clock, he pulled himself up
short, took away her extra pillows, switched off her night lamp and
ordered her to go to sleep at once. Her apparent docility did not
altogether satisfy him and two or three times during the hour before he
himself fell asleep, he sat up to look under the door and see whether
she had turned the light on again.

He was right about that, of course. The enforced calm Mary had imposed
upon herself as a penance for the tempest of emotion she had
indulged--she had lain without moving, hardly a finger, from the time she
remade that bed and crept back into it until hearing Rush coming she
switched on the light--had had a sort of hypnotic effect upon her. So
long as her body did not move, it ceased to exist altogether and set her
spirit free, like a pale-winged luna moth from its chrysalis to adventure
into the night. The light it kept fluttering back to was that blinding
experience with March while the music of his song had surged through her
and her hand had been crushed in his.

Rush's coming in had brought her back to that tired still body of hers
again; his voice soothed, his presence comforted her; at his occasional
touch she was able to relax. (If only there were some one who loved her,
who would hold her tight--tight--) She hoped he would go on talking to
her; on and on. Because while he talked she could manage to stop
thinking--by the squirrel-like process of storing away all the ideas he
was suggesting to her for consideration later.

But when the respite was over and she lay back in the dark again, she
made no effort to deny admission to the thoughts that came crowding so
thickly. She must think; she must, before the ordeal of the next
breakfast table, have taken thought. She must have decided if not what
she should do, at least what she could hope for. She was much clearer and
saner for the little interlude with Rush.

Suppose in the first place;--suppose that Paula's rebellion was serious.
Suppose the Tower