She told me I needn't be afraid." Then he came to his feet with a gesture of surrender. "Will you let me see her?" he asked John. "Now. Just for a minute before I go."

John, by that time, was on his feet, too, staring. "What do you mean, man? Afraid of what? What is it you're afraid of?"

March didn't answer the question in words, but for a moment he met her father's gaze eye to eye and what John saw was enough.

"Good G.o.d!" he whispered. "Why--why didn't you ..." Then turning swiftly toward the door. "Come along."

"I'm really not afraid," March panted as he followed him up the stairs, "because of her promise. It was just a twinge."

Her door at the foot of the stairs which led to the music room stood wide open, but both men came to an involuntary breathless pause outside it.

Then John went in, looked for a brief moment at the figure that slept so gently in the narrow little bed, gave a rea.s.suring nod to March who had hung back in the doorway, a nod that invited him in; then turned away and covered his face with his hands just for one steadying instant until the shock of that abominable fear should pa.s.s away.

When he looked again March stood at the bedside gazing down into the girl's face. It was as if his presence there were palpable to her. She opened her eyes sleepily, smiled a fleeting contented smile and held up her arms to her lover. He smiled, too, and bent down and kissed her. Then as the arms that had clasped his neck slipped down he straightened, nodded to John and went back to the door. John followed and for a moment, outside the room, they talked in whispers.

"I'm going home now," March said. "To my father's house--not the other place. There's a telephone there if she wants me. But I'll call anyhow before I go to Ravina this afternoon."

It was he, this time, who held out his hand.

"You can trust her with me in the meantime, I think," John said as he took it, but the irony of that was softened by a smile. March smiled, too, and with no more words went away.

Her eyes turned upon John when he came back into the room, wide open but still full of sleep. When he stood once more beside her bed a pat of her hand invited him to sit down upon the edge of it.

"He really was here, wasn't he?" she asked. "I wasn't dreaming?"

"No, he was here," John said.

Her eyelids drooped again. "I'm having the loveliest dreams," she told him. "I suppose I ought to be waking up. What time is it?"

"It's still very early. Only about half past eight. Go back to sleep."

"Have you had breakfast? Pete's wife, out in the garage, will come in and get it for you."

"When I feel like breakfast, I'll see to it that I get some," he said, rising.

Once more she roused herself a little. "Stay here, then, for a while,"

she said. "Pull that chair up close."

When he had planted the easy chair in the place she indicated and seated himself in it she gave him one of her hands to hold. But in another minute she was fast asleep.

And that, you know, was the hottest, most intolerable sting of all. He was sore, of course, all over. He had been badly battered during the last four days. Some of those moments with March down-stairs had been like blows from a bludgeon. But his daughter's sleepy attempt to concern herself about his breakfast and the perfunctory caress of that slack unconscious hand had the effect of the climax of it all.

She'd just been through the crisis of her life. She'd been down chin-deep in the black waters of tragedy (he didn't yet know, he told himself, what the elements of the crisis were nor the poisonous springs of the tragedy) and all her father meant to her was a domestic responsibility, some one that breakfast must be provided for!

He managed to control his release of her hand and his rising from his chair so that these actions should not be so brusk as to waken her again and, leaving the room, went down to his own.

That was the way with children. They remained a part of you but you were never a part of them. Mary having awakened for her lover, smiled at him, been rea.s.sured by his kiss, had been content to drop off to sleep again.

Her father didn't matter. Not even his derelictions mattered.

He had been derelict. He didn't pretend to evade that. He could have forgiven her reproaches; welcomed them. But thanks to March, she had nothing to reproach him for The presence of a man she had known a matter of weeks obliterated past years like the writing on a child's slate. He tried to erect an active resentment against the composer. Didn't all his troubles go back to the day the man had come, to tune the drawing-room piano? First Paula and then Mary.

None of this was very real and he knew it. There was an underlying stratum of his consciousness that this didn't get down to at all, which, when it managed to get a word in, labeled it mere petulance, a childish attempt to find solace for his hurts in building up a grievance, a whole fortress of grievances to take shelter in against the bombardment of facts.

Was this the quality of his bitter four days' quarrel with Paula? Was the last accusation she had hurled at him last night before she shut herself in her room, a fact? "Of course, I'm jealous of Mary," she had acknowledged furiously when he charged her with it. "You don't care anything about me except for your pleasure. Down there in Tryon, when you didn't want that, you got rid of me and sent for Mary instead. If that weren't true, you wouldn't have been so anxious all these years that I shouldn't have a child."

No, that wasn't a fact, though it could be twisted into looking like one.

If he had refrained from urging motherhood upon her, if he'd given her the benefit of his special knowledge, didn't her interest in her career as a singer establish the presumption that it was her wish rather than his that they were following. Had she ever said she'd like to have a baby? Or even hinted?

He pulled himself up. There was no good going over that again.

He bathed and shaved and dressed himself in fresh clothes, operations which had been perforce omitted at the cottage this morning in favor of his departure without arousing Paula. (He'd slept, or rather lain awake, upon the hammock in the veranda.) When he came down-stairs he found Pete's wife already in the kitchen, gave her directions about his breakfast and then from force of habit, thought of his morning paper. The delivery of it had been discontinued, of course, for the months the house was closed, so he walked down to Division Street to get one.

He had got his mind into a fairly quiescent state by then which made the trick it played when he first caught sight of the great stacks of _Tribunes_ and _Heralds_ on the corner news-stand all the more terrifying. It had the force of an hallucination; as if in the head-lines he actually saw the word suicide in thick black letters. And his daughter's name underneath.

He had managed, somehow, to evade that word; to refrain from putting into any words at all the peril Mary had so narrowly escaped, although the fact had hung, undisguised, between him and March during the moment they stared at each other before they went up-stairs together. It avenged that evasion by leaping upon him now. He bought his paper and hurried home with it under his arm, feeling as if it might still contain the news of that tragedy.

Reacting from this irrational panic he tried to discount the whole thing.

March hadn't lied, of course, but, being a lover, he had exaggerated. As John sat over his breakfast he got to feeling quite comfortable about this. His mind went back to the breakfast he had had with Mary at Ravinia --breakfast after much such an abominable night as this last had been--the breakfast they had left for that talk under the trees beside the lake. And then his own words came back and stabbed him.

He had been arguing with her his right to extinguish himself if he chose.

He had said he had no religion real enough to make a valid denial of that right. It was a question no one else could presume to decide. How much more had he said to that sensitive nerve-drawn child of his? He remembered how white she had gone for a moment, a little later. And he had pretended not to see! Just as he had been pretending, a few minutes back, to doubt the reality of the peril March had saved her from. What a liar he was!

Sentimentality, March had quoted Mary as saying, was the cruelest thing in the world. John stood convicted now of that cruelty toward his daughter. Was he guilty of it, also, toward his wife? Did their quarrel boil down to that?

CHAPTER XXVII

SETTLING PAULA

Anthony March might deny as much as he pleased that he was "enough of an Olympian to laugh" at life's ironies, but it remained true that his G.o.d had a sense of humor and that March himself appreciated it. When, well within that same twenty-four hours, a third member of the Wollaston family insisted upon telling him her troubles and asking him what she'd best do about them, he conceded with the flicker of an inward grin (not at all at the troubles which were serious enough nor at their sufferer who was in despair), that the great Disposer, having set out to demolish that philosophy, enjoyed making a thorough job of it.

It was about four o'clock on Sunday afternoon that he came to Paula's cottage at Ravinia to get the score to _The Outcry_. The maid who opened the door informed him that her mistress wasn't at home, but when he told her what he wanted, and she had gone rather dubiously up-stairs to see about it, it was Paula herself who, after a wait of ten minutes or so, came down with the ma.n.u.script in her hand.

He was, perhaps, just the one person in the world she'd have come down to see. All the explanation she volunteered to herself was that he didn't matter. It didn't matter, this was to say, if he did perceive that she had been crying for days and days and looked an utter wreck.

And then his errand brought her a touch of comfort. The acceptance of _The Outcry_ for production restored the proprietary feeling she once had had about it. She was the discoverer of _The Outcry_ and if you'd asked her who was responsible for the revival of interest in it and for the fact that it was now to be produced, I think she'd have told you quite honestly that she was. Hadn't she asked them all to come to her house to hear it? And sung the part of "Dolores" herself at that very informal audition?

And I'll hazard one further guess. It is that her quarrel with John made March's opera a rather pleasanter thing to dwell on a little. She had taken it up in defiance of his wish in the first place; her abandonment of it had acquired from its context the color of a self-sacrificial impulse. She would carry out her contract, she had told John down in Tryon, but she wouldn't sing "Dolores" for anybody. Well, now that her love-life with John was irremediably wrecked, there was a sort of melancholy satisfaction in handling, once more, the thing that stood as the innocent symbol of the disaster.

That's neither here nor there, of course. Paula was totally unaware of any such constellation about her simple act of deciding to carry down the score herself instead of handing it over to the maid.

The sight of him standing over the piano in her sitting-room cheered her and the look of melancholy she brought down-stairs with her was replaced by a spontaneous unexpected smile. Just as Mary, out at Hickory Hill, had predicted, she remembered how well she liked him. She laid the ma.n.u.script on the piano in order to give him both hands.

"I can't tell you how pleased I am about it," she said. "I wish you all the luck in the world."

He brightened responsively at that but looked, she thought, a little surprised, too.