A faint amus.e.m.e.nt showed in his face and presently brightened into a smile. "I'm really very relieved," he added, "that it was you who got here first."

And then the smile vanished and his voice took a new timbre, not of challenge, certainly not of defiance, but all the more for that of authority. "The only other person in the house is Mary."

A sudden weakness of the legs caused John to seat himself, with what appearance of deliberation he could manage, in the nearest chair. March, however, remained on his feet.

"I brought her home last night," he went on, "very late--early this morning rather--with the intention of leaving her here alone. But I decided to stay. Also it was her preference that I should. I suspect she's asleep. She promised, at least, to call me if she didn't."

That, apparently, finished for the present what he had to say. He turned--it really was rather gentle the way he disengaged himself from the fixity of John's look,--replaced the cushions on the cane davenport; and then, seating himself, began putting on his shoes.

Precisely that gentleness, though it checked on John's tongue the angry question, "What the devil were you doing with her until early this morning?" only added to his anger by depriving it of a target. For a minute he sat inarticulate, boiling.

It was an outrageous piece of slacking on Rush's part that he should have deserted his sister before the arrival of one or the other of his promised reenforcements relieved him of his duty. It was inexcusable of Lucile to let a trivial matter like a broken spring keep her at Hickory Hill. There were plenty of trains, weren't there? And the third rail every hour? It was shockingly disengenuous of Mary, when she talked with him over the telephone yesterday afternoon, to have suppressed the essential fact that Rush had already deserted her and that she was at that moment alone.

And then his anger turned upon himself, as a voice within him asked whether, on his conscience, he could affirm that this knowledge would have made a difference in his own actions. Could he be sure he wouldn't have clutched at the a.s.surance that his sister was already on the way rather than have exacerbated his quarrel with Paula by doing the one thing that would annoy her most.

Laboriously he got himself together, steadied himself. "You mustn't think," he said, "that I'm not grateful. We're all grateful, of course, to you for having done what our combined negligence appears to have made necessary." Then his voice hardened and the ring of anger crept into it as he added, "You may be sure that nothing of the sort will occur again."

"No," March said dryly. "It won't occur again." He straightened up and faced John Wollaston squarely. "I've persuaded Mary to marry me," he said.

"To marry--_you_!" John echoed blankly. For a moment before his mind began to work, he merely stared. The first thought that struggled through was a reluctant recognition of the fact that there was a sort of dignity in the man which not even the stale look, inevitable about one who has just slept in his clothes, could overcome. No more than his pallor and the lines of fatigue deeply marked in his face could impeach his air of authority. There was something to him not quite accountable under any of the categories John was in the habit of applying. So much John had conceded from the first; from that morning in this very room when he had found him tuning the Circa.s.sian grand and had gone away, shutting the door over yonder, so that Paula shouldn't hear.

But that Mary should seriously contemplate marrying him! Mary! Good G.o.d!

Once more March disengaged himself from John's fixed gaze. Not at all as if he couldn't support it; gently again, by way of giving the older man time to recover from his astonishment. He went into the bay and stood looking out the window into the bright hot empty street. From where he sat John could see his face in profile. He certainly was d.a.m.ned cool about it.

There recurred to John's mind, a moment during that day's drive he had taken with Mary, down South, when he had leaped to the wild surmise that there might be something between those two. She'd been talking about the piano tuner with what struck him as a surprisingly confident understanding.

She had instantly, he remembered, divined his thought and as swiftly set it at rest. March wasn't, she had said, a person who saved himself up for special people. He was there for anybody, like a public drinking fountain.

But had she been ingenuous in making that reply to him? Had he really been in her confidence about the man? Obviously not. The only encounter between them that he had ever heard about was the one she had upon that day described to him. And Lucile and Rush were evidently as completely in the dark about the affair as he himself had been. Their meetings, their numerous meetings, must have been clandestine. That Mary, his own white little daughter, should be capable of an affair like that!

Another memory flashed into his mind. The evening of that same day when she had tried to tell him why she couldn't marry Graham. She wasn't, she had said, innocent enough for Graham; she wasn't even quite--good.

The horror of the conclusion he seemed to be drifting upon literally, for a moment, nauseated John Wollaston. The sweat felt cold upon his forehead. And then, white hot, bracing him like brandy, a wave of anger.

Some preliminary move toward speaking evidently caught March's ear, for he turned alertly and looked. It was one of the oddest experiences John Wollaston had ever had. The moment he met March's gaze, the whole infernal pattern, like an old-fashioned set-piece in fireworks, extinguished itself as suddenly as it had flared. There was something indescribable in this man's face that simply made grotesque the notion that he could be a blackguard. John felt himself clutching at his anger to keep him up but the momentary belief which had fed it was gone.

March's face darkened, too. "If you have any idea," he said, "that I've taken any advantage--or attempted to take any..."

"No," John said quickly. "I don't believe anything like that. I confess there was a moment just now when it looked like that; when I couldn't make it look like anything else. It is still quite unaccountable to me.

That explanation is discarded--but I'd like the real one."

"I don't believe," March said, reflecting over it for a moment, "that there is any explanation I could give that would make it much more accountable. We love each other. That is a fact that, accountable or not, we both had to recognize a number of weeks ago. I didn't ask her to marry me until last night. I wouldn't have asked her then if it hadn't become clear to me that her happiness depended upon it as much as mine did. When she was able to see that the converse was also true, we--agreed upon it."

"What I asked for," John said, "was an explanation. What you have offered is altogether inadequate--if it can be called an explanation at all." He wrenched his eyes away from March's face. "I've liked you," he went on, "I've liked you despite the fact that I've had some excuse for entertaining a contradictory feeling. And I concede your extraordinary talents. But it remains true that you're not--the sort of man I'd expect my daughter to marry. Nor, unless I could see some better reason than I see now, permit her to marry."

This was further than, in cool blood, he'd have gone. But the finding of a stranger here in his own place (any man would have been a stranger when it came as close as this to Mary) professing to understand her needs, to see with the clear eye of certainty where her happiness lay, angered and outraged him. The more for an irresistible conviction that the profession was true. But that word permit went too far. He wasn't enough of an old-fashioned parent to believe, at all whole-heartedly, that Mary was his to dispose of.

Again, he looked up at the man's face, braced for the retort his challenge had laid him open to, and once more the expression he saw there--a thing as momentary as a shimmer of summer lightning,--told him more than anything within the resources of rhetoric could have effected.

It was something a little less than a smile that flashed across March's face, a look half pitiful, half ironic. It told John Wollaston that his permission was not needed. Events had got beyond him. He was superseded.

He dropped back limp in his chair. March seated himself, too, and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped.

"I know how it must look to you, sir," he said gravely. "Even the social aspect of the thing in the narrowest sense of the word is serious. And there are other difficulties harder to get over than that. I don't think I minimize any of them. And I don't believe that Mary does. But the main thing is a fact that can't be escaped. If we face that first ..."

He broke off there for a moment and John saw him grip his hands together.

It was with a visible effort that he went on.

"One of the things Mary said last night was that sentimentality was the crudest thing in the world. It caused more tragedies, she said, than malice. She had learned the cruelty of it by experience. It's not an experience she can safely go through again."

It was in an automatic effort to defend himself against the conviction he felt closing down upon him that John lashed out here with a reply.

"The fact you're asking me to face is, I suppose, that you two have discovered you're in love with each other to a degree that makes all other considerations negligible."

"That's not quite it," March replied patiently. "A part of it is, that it would have been just as impossible for Mary to marry Graham Stannard if she had never seen me. And if she could forget me completely it would still be impossible for her to marry any one else like him."

John didn't follow that very closely. His mind was still upon the last sentence of March's former speech. "It's not an experience she can safely go through again." What did he mean by that? How much did he mean by that? Would John, if he could, plumb the full depth of that meaning?

There was no use fighting any longer.

"The simplest way of stating the fact, I suppose," he said, "is that you two mean to marry and that you're satisfied that your reasons for making the decision are valid. Well, if Mary corroborates you, as I have no doubt she will, I'll face that fact as realistically as possible. I'll agree not to, as you put it, sentimentalize."

Then he got up and held out his hand. "I mean that for a better welcome that it sounds," he concluded. And if there was no real feeling of kindliness for his prospective son-in-law behind the words, there was what came to the same thing, a realization that this feeling was bound to come in time. No candid-minded person could keep alive, for very long, a grievance against Anthony March.

The physician in him spoke automatically while their hands were gripped.

"Good lord, man! You're about at the end of your rope. Exhausted--that's what I mean. How long is it since you've fed?"

March was vague about this; wouldn't be drawn into the line John had been diverted into. He answered another question or two of the same tenor with half his mind and finally said--with the first touch of impatience he had betrayed, "I'm all right! That can wait. There's one more thing I want to say before you talk to Mary."

He seemed grateful for John's permission to sit down again, dropped into his chair in a way that suggested he might have fallen into it in another minute, and took the time he visibly needed for getting his wits into working order again.

"I think I can see how the prospect must look to you," he began. "The difficulties and objections that you see are, I guess, the same ones that appeared to me. The fact that I'm not in her world, at all. That I've never even tried to succeed nor get on, nor even to earn a decent living.

And that, however hard I work to change all that, it will only be by perfectly extraordinary luck if I can contrive to make a life for her that will be--externally anywhere near as good a life as the one she's always taken for granted.

"It won't be as much worse, though, as you are likely to think. With the help she'll give me I shall be able to earn a decent living. Unless that opera of mine fails--laughably, and I don't believe it will, up at Ravinia, it will help quite a lot. Make it possible for me to get some pupils in composition. And I know I can write some songs that will be publishable and singable--for persons who aren't musicians like Paula. I did write two or three for the boys in Bordeaux that went pretty well.

That sort of thing didn't seem worth while to me then and I never went on with it.

"Oh, you know how I've felt about it. How I've talked about traveling light and not letting my life get cluttered up. But that isn't really the thing that's changed. I've never been willing to pay, in liberty and leisure, for things I didn't want. The only difference is that there's something now that I do want. And I shan't shirk paying for it. I want you to understand that."

He stressed the word you in a way that puzzled John a little, but what he went on to say after a moment's hesitation made his meaning clear.

"That's preliminary. You'll find that Mary's misgivings--she's not without them and they won't be easy to overcome--aren't the same as ours.

Those aren't the things that she's afraid of. She's afraid of taking my liberty away from me. She won't be able to believe, easily, that my old vagabond ways have lost their importance for me; that they're a phase I can afford to outgrow. She's likely to think I've sacrificed something essential in going regularly to work, giving lessons, writing popular songs. Of course, it will rest mostly with me to satisfy her that that isn't true, but any help you can give her along that line, I'll be grateful for. Last night she seemed convinced--far enough to give me her promise but..."

Words faded away there into an uneasy silence. John, looking intently into the man's face, saw him wrestling, he thought, with same idea, some fear, some sort of nightmare horror which with all the power of his will he was struggling not to give access to. He pressed his clenched hands against his eyes.

"What is it?" John asked sharply. "What's the matter?"

"It's nothing," March said between his teeth. "She promised, as I said.