Part 43 (2/2)

Her face flamed at that. ”John _has_ been talking about me this morning!”

she cried.

He shook his head. ”It was only a chance shot,” he told her. ”I'm sorry if it came close enough home to hurt. But there couldn't be a better day-dream than that and there's no reason I can see why it shouldn't come reasonably true, if you'll honestly try for as much of it as you can get.

That's the prescription, anyhow. Give up n.o.bility and all the heroic poses that go with it and practise a little enlightened selfishness instead. Perhaps by force of example you may persuade John Wollaston to abandon about half of his conscience. Then you _would_ be settled.”

With that he went back to his score and by no protest or expostulation could she provoke another word out of him. She fidgeted about the room for a quarter of an hour or so. Then with the announcement that she was going to dress, left it and went up-stairs.

When she came down a while later in street things and a hat she presented him with a new perplexity.

”I've been trying everywhere I can think of to get a car,” she said, ”and there simply isn't one to be had. I even tried to borrow one.”

He asked her what she wanted of a car. Where she wanted to go.

”Oh, can't you see!” she cried, ”I don't want to send for John again to come to me. I want to go to him. It's too maddening!”

”Well,” he said, with a grin, ”if you really want--desperately--to go to him, of course there's the trolley.”

She stared at him for a moment and then perceiving, or thinking she perceived, something allegorical about the suggestion, she gave a laugh, swooped down and kissed him and went.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE KALEIDOSCOPE

It was the next Sunday morning that Miss Wollaston, who had decided to stay in town even though the emergency she had been summoned to meet was found mysteriously to have evanesced when she arrived, asked Wallace Hood, walking home with her from church, to come in to lunch.

”I haven't the least idea,” she said, ”whether we shall be quite by ourselves or whether the entire family, including the latest addition to it, will come straggling in before we've finished.”

She would not have considered it quite delicate to have owned to him how very clearly she hoped to have him, for an hour or two, all to herself.

He would be found, she was confident, not to have gone through the looking-gla.s.s into the world of topsy-turvey that all the rest of them seemed to be inhabiting, these days. It would be comforting to talk with somebody who was still capable of regarding things right side to.

She was much too penetrating a person not to have been perfectly aware from the first that, astonis.h.i.+ng as were the facts John had communicated to her, upon her arrival from Hickory Hill a week ago, other facts of major importance were being suppressed.

She had found her brother apparently occupied in the normal Sunday morning manner with his newspaper, and he had answered her rather breathless inquiries about Mary by saying that she was all right. She was finis.h.i.+ng off her night's sleep but would, he supposed, be down by and by. There was nothing the matter. Rush had been unnecessarily alarmed, lacking the fact which explained the case. And then he sprang his mine, informing her that Mary was engaged to marry Anthony March.

When, after a speechless interval, she had asked him, feebly, whether he didn't mean Graham Stannard, he had been very short with her indeed. The engagement to March was an accomplished fact, and the sooner we took it for granted the better. He showed a great reluctance to go further into detail about the matter and he flinched impatiently from the innocent question;--when had he himself been informed of this astounding state of things. Well, naturally, since in the train of his answer the fact had been elicited that he hadn't come to town until this morning and that Mary had spent another night alone. And it was not Mary but March who had, already this morning, told him about it.

Beyond that John couldn't be driven to go. He concluded by putting a categorical injunction upon her. She wasn't to expostulate with Mary nor to attempt to examine either into her reasons for this step nor into her state of mind in making it. He was satisfied that the girl knew what she was doing and that it represented her real wishes. His sister's satisfaction on these points would have to be vicarious.

The surmise had formed itself irresistibly in Lucile's mind that John himself was involved in this decision of Mary's. Had she done this thing--involved herself in the beginnings of it, anyhow,--as a desperate measure to bring her father and his wife together again? By removing a temptation that Paula was still in danger of yielding to? She didn't put it to herself quite as crudely as that to be sure.

Certainly she had no intention of asking Wallace Hood what he thought about it. But perhaps he might have some other explanation of her niece's sacrifice. It must have been a sacrifice to something. An answer to some fancied call of duty. Unless it were a freak of sheer perversity.

But this was dangerous ground for Lucile.

The queerest thing about it all was the way it seemed--magically--to be producing such beneficent results. John and Paula were reconciled by it,--or at least as soon as it happened. Paula had come down from Ravinia that very day, had had some sort of scene with her husband, and the two had been almost annoyingly at one upon every conceivable subject since.

Something had happened also during the week to Rush, which lightened the gloom that had been hanging on him so long,--some utterly surprising interview with Graham Stannard's father. Pure coincidence one must suppose this to be, of course. Mary's engagement couldn't have anything to do with it. And then Mary herself! The girl was a new person.

Absolutely radiant. Orthodox conduct of course for a just engaged girl--but in the circ.u.mstances one would think...

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