Part 32 (1/2)

It occurred to her to suggest that they go back, but she dismissed the impulse with no more than a glancing thought. It was his burden, not hers, that remained to be shouldered at the cottage and it might be left to him to choose his own time for taking it up. Paula seldom came down much before noon anyhow.

As for John Wollaston, he was very tired. Paula's volcanic moments always exhausted him. He never could derationalize his emotions, cut himself free; and while he felt just as intensely as she did, he had to carry the whole superstructure of himself along on those tempestuous voyages. In the mood Paula had left him in this morning, there was nothing in the world that could have satisfied and restored him as did his daughter's companions.h.i.+p. The peace of this wordless prolongation of their talk together was something he lacked, for a long while, the will to break.

It was not far short of noon when they came back into the veranda together. He had walked the last hundred yards, after a look at his watch, pretty fast and after a glance into both the down-stairs rooms, he called up-stairs to his wife in a voice that had an edge of sudden anxiety in it. Then getting no response, he went up, two at a time.

Mary dropped down, limp with a sudden premonition, upon the gloucester swing in the veranda. The maid of all work, who had heard his call, came from the kitchen just as he was returning down the stairs. Mrs. Wollaston had gone away, she said. Pete had reported with the big car at eleven o'clock and Paula, who apparently had been waiting for him, had driven off at once having left word that she would not be back for lunch.

”All right,” John said curtly. ”You may go.”

He was so white when he rejoined Mary in the veranda that she sprang up with an involuntary cry and would have had him lie down, where she had been sitting. But the fine steely ring in his voice stopped her short.

”Have you any idea,” he asked, ”where she has gone or what she has gone to do? She came down,” he went on without waiting for her answer,--”and looked for me. Waited for me. And thanks to that--walk we took, I wasn't here. Well, can you guess what she's done?”

”It's only a guess,” Mary said, ”but she may have gone to see Martin Whitney.”

”Martin Whitney?” he echoed blankly. ”What for? What does she want of him?”

”She spoke of him,” Mary said, ”in connection with the money, the twenty thousand dollars...”

He broke in upon her again with a mere blank frantic echo of her words and once more Mary steadied herself to explain.

”Her agreement with Mr. Ware required her to put up twenty thousand dollars in some banker's hands as a guarantee that she would not break the contract. She mentioned Martin Whitney as the natural person to hold it. So I guessed that she might have gone to consult him about it;--or even to ask him to lend it to her. As she said, it wouldn't have to be spent.”

”That's the essence of the contract then. It's nothing without that.

Until she gets the money and puts it up. Yet you told me nothing of it until this moment. If you had done so--instead of inviting me to go for a walk--and giving her a chance to get away...”

He couldn't be allowed to go on. ”Do you mean that you think I did that--for the purpose?” she asked steadily.

He flushed and turned away. ”No, of course I don't. I'm half mad over this.”

He walked abruptly into the house and a moment later she heard him at the telephone. She stayed where she was, unable to think; stunned rather than hurt over the way he had sprung upon her.

He seemed a little quieter when he came out a few minutes later.

”Whitney left half an hour ago for Lake Geneva,” he said. ”So she's missed him if that's where she went. There's nothing to do but wait.”

He was very nervous however. Whenever the telephone rang, as it did of course pretty often, he answered it himself, and each time his disappointment that it was not Paula asking for him, broke down more or less the calm he tried to impose upon himself. He essayed what amends good manners enabled him to make to Mary for his outrageous attack upon her. It went no deeper than that. The discovery that Paula was gone and simultaneously that he need not have lost her obliterated--or rather reversed--the morning's mood completely.

It was after lunch that he said, dryly, ”I upset your life for you, half a dozen years ago. Unfairly. Inexcusably. I've always been ashamed of it.

But it lends a sort of poetic justice to this.”

She made no immediate reply, but not long afterward she asked if she might not go away without waiting for Paula's return. ”It would be too difficult, don't you think?--for the three of us, in a small house like this.”

He agreed with manifest relief. He asked if it was not too late to drive that afternoon to Hickory Hill, but she said she'd prefer to go by train anyhow. That was possible she thought.

He did not ask, in so many words, if this was where she meant to go.

There was no other place for her that he could think of.

CHAPTER XXI