impression, once more, when he was coming down from the music room that
this was the door which he had just heard softly shut as if some one, the
princess herself, of course, who had stood listening to the music for a
while, had withdrawn there when she heard his step on the stairs. Once on
the settee in the hall he saw a riding crop and a small beaver hat that
he felt a curious certainty belonged to her and once out of a confusion
of young voices in the drawing-room, and a dance tune going on the
Victrola, he heard some one call out her name, hers he was sure though he
didn't hear her answer. Perhaps she had answered without speaking. The
dumb princess again.

Then suddenly even these faint hints of her presence ceased, and he
remarked their absence with a troubled wonder until one day Paula
volunteered the statement that Mary had gone away on a visit for a month
or two, out to Wyoming, where a great friend of hers, Olive Corbett, and
her husband had a ranch.

By asking a few intelligent questions, he could have found out a lot
more about her from Paula for she was disposed to talk freely enough
about the family life she was so oddly enclosed in, and their perpetual
quarrels about the opera never carried over into their breathing spells.
In the long hours of their almost daily sessions the occasional rests
made up quite a total and March accumulated a lot of information about
Paula herself.

Indeed it was not quite as idle as that sounds. Paula talked to him
thirstily, gave him somehow the impression that she had had no one for a
good many years with whom she could converse without reservation in her
own idiom.

She came, he learned, of a Virginia family which had migrated during her
early childhood to California. It was obvious that they were well-bred,
but equally so that they were not very competent. The victims, he judged,
of a lot of played-out southern ideas and traditions. They were still
living and March allowed himself to guess that they were one of the minor
reasons why Doctor John had to earn a lot of money.

Paula with her splendid physique and gorgeous voice must have looked to
them like the family hope. They had managed at considerable sacrifice to
send her abroad, but evidently without any idea of the time and the money
it takes to erect even the most promising material into a genuine
success. After a year or two, she had been abandoned to make her way as
best she could.

Even now that they were