m as an excuse, and Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had
only herself to blame for what happened.

She had elected to be tragic; preferred the Catskills with a dull old
aunt to Vienna with a gay young father. John went alone, sore from the
quarrel and rather adrift. In Vienna, he met Paula Carresford, an
American opera singer, young, extraordinarily beautiful, and of
unimpeachable respectability. They were in Vienna together the first week
in August, 1914. They got out together, sailed on the same ship for
America and in the autumn of that year, here in Chicago, in the most
decorous manner in the world, John married her.

There was a room in Miss Wollaston's well ordered mind which she had
always guarded as an old-fashioned New England village housewife used to
guard the best parlor, no light, no air, no dust, Holland covers on all
the furniture. Rigorously she forbore to speculate upon the attraction
which had drawn John and Paula together--upon what had happened between
them--upon how the thing had looked and felt to either of them. She
covered the whole episode with one blanket observation: she supposed it
was natural in the circumstances.

And there was much to be thankful for. Paula was well-bred; she was
amiable; she was "nice"; nice to an amazing degree, considering. She had
made a genuine social success. She had given John a new lease on life,
turned back the clock for him, oh--years.

Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had taken it surprisingly well. At the wedding
she had played her difficult part admirably and during the few months she
had stayed at home after the wedding, she had not only kept on good terms
with Paula but had seemed genuinely to like her. In the spring of the
next year, 1915, she had, indeed, left home and had not been back since
except for infrequent visits. But then there was reason enough--excuse
enough, anyhow--for that. The war was enveloping them all. Rush had left
his freshman year at Harvard uncompleted to go to France and drive an
ambulance (he enlisted a little later in the French Army). Mary had gone
to New York to work on the Belgian War Relief Fund, and she had been
working away at it ever since.

There was then no valid reason--no reason at all unless she were willing
to go rummaging in that dark room of her mind for it--why John should
always wince like that when one reminded him of Mary. It was a fact,
though, that he did, and his sister was too honest-minded to pretend she
did not kn