w ending from half a mile
away. When he came back into the wings from his fourth recall he saw
her face shining with joy through her tears. But his heart sank when he
saw, standing beside her, Paula. He thanked his gods that Mary had a
sense of humor.

Paula was smiling in high satisfaction, and she spoke first. "Well,
stupid," she demanded, "what have you got to say for yourself, now?"

"Not a word," he answered, smiling too, "except that we have to live
to learn."

Then he explained to Mary. "That ending--having the girl come back to
life again, to sing some more after she'd been shot--was one of the
things Paula was trying to make me do, all the while. And some of the
other changes were, too."

"But not that trumpet," said Paula, and he could only blush.

In a moment of dead silence, just before the crash that accompanied the
descent of the curtain, he had scored for the C trumpet, muted and
pianissimo, a phrase in the rhythm of the first three bars of the
_Marsellaise_, but going up on the open tones and sustaining the high G,
so that it carried also, a suggestion of _The Star Spangled Banner_. A
flagrant trick, but it had served to remind the audience, bruised by the
horror of abomination it had just witnessed, of the vengeance which, afar
off, was gathering.

"I'd like to know what you'd have said to me," Paula went on, "if I'd
asked you to do that!"

Mary laughed, and pushed her lover toward the stage. "Oh, go back," she
said. "They want you again, my dear."

They gave _The Outcry_ two more performances during the next week, one of
them being the closing performance of the season, and by that time, so
far as a single success could be said to establish any one, March was
established. He and Mary discussed this rather soberly as they drove home
in the small car after the convivial wind-up supper at the Moraine, where
this fact had been effusively dwelt upon. Their wedding was now less than
a month off.

"I know," she admitted, "it looks as if I were all wrong. To go on being
afraid of--harness and millstones and all that. But just the same ...
Oh, you can live my sort of life. That's been made plain enough. But I
wish I could think of some way of making you sure that I could live
yours, as well. Your old one; the _Chemineau_ one. The way it was when
you came to Hickory Hill."

A few minutes later she gave a sudden laugh. "Tony," she said, "will you
swear you will do something for me--without knowing wh