"You see what a cat I am," she told March as they set out. "I make her squirm without meaning to, and then, when she squirms, I scratch. Now talk to me until I can get in good humor with myself again."

"I've two or three things to tell you," he said. "I saw Sylvia Stannard this morning. She came to rehearsal with the little Williamson girl, and carried me off bodily for a talk. She's had a long letter from Graham.

"He's quite well," he went on swiftly, ignoring the gasp she gave, "and doesn't want to be, as he says, fussed over."

"Where is he?" she asked. "I'll write him a letter, of course. Only you'll have to tell me what to say."

"He's visiting a friend--a college cla.s.smate--on Long Island. And he's already had a job offered him by his friend's father, in an engineering office. He's a pretty good engineer, I believe. He thinks he'll accept it. Anyhow, he is definitely not coming back to Hickory Hill. Sylvia attaches some significance to the fact that his friend also has a pretty sister, but that's just the cynicism of youth, I suspect."

This last suggestion silenced her--with another gasp, as perhaps he had meant it to do. He added, presently:

"As for writing, I've already done that myself."

"You!" she exclaimed. "Where's the letter?"

"It's already despatched. I wrote it as soon as the rehearsal was over.

But I'll tell you what I said in it. I told him I supposed he had heard of our engagement, but that I knew you wished him to be told of it personally. You were very fond of him, I said, and the only thing that clouded your happiness was a fear that he might not be able to share it.

I a.s.sured him that I was completely in your confidence and knew that you had been through a period of very severe nervous stress, verging upon a nervous breakdown, but that I believed you were on the way to a speedy recovery. And I ended by saying that I believed a line from him to you, setting some of your misgivings at rest, would hasten it. And I was his most cordially."

She didn't try to pretend she wasn't aghast at this. "But what an--extraordinary letter. Won't he be--furious? At you for writing?--Speaking for me in a case like that. Telling him you knew all about it!"

"Well, that was more or less the idea," he confessed, with a rueful grin.

"He'll think I stole you away from him; he'll think I gave you the nervous prostration I hinted at. Heaven knows what he won't think! But, of course, the more of a villain I am the less you're to be held responsible. And there's nothing insupportable or--ludicrous about a grievance against another man. At all events it enables him to get round the statement you demolished him with. No, you'll see. He'll write you a letter, correctly affectionate but rather chilly, and after that you'll be off his mind. And if the pretty sister Sylvia alleges doesn't exist, there'll be another one along pretty soon, who will."

She was obviously a little dazed by all this. It was the first time they had talked of Graham since that night in his room and he knew the bruise from that experience must still be painful to touch. So he hastened to produce his other item of news--also provided by Sylvia.

"This is a perfectly dead secret of hers," he began. "Told me in sacred confidence. She finished, however, by saying that she knew, of course, I'd go straight and tell you. So to justify her penetration, I will.

Sylvia has accounted for her father's amazing change of att.i.tude toward Hickory Hill. It seems she's persuaded her father to give Graham's share of it to her. She told him--what's obviously true--that she's a better farmer now than Graham would ever be. She hates town and society and all that, she says, and never will be happy anywhere but on a farm--anywhere, indeed, but on that farm. He was very rough and boisterous about the suggestion, she says, for a day or two, but finally he quieted down like a lamb and gave in. He never has refused her anything, of course."

"But a partnership between her and Rush!" Mary cried. "It's perfectly impossibly mad. Unless, of course ... You don't mean...?"

"Yes, that's the idea, exactly," March said. "Only Rush, as yet, knows nothing about it. Hence the need for secrecy. Sylvia acknowledged to her father that she couldn't possibly own a farm in partnership with a young man of twenty-three unless she married him, but she said she'd intended to marry Rush ever since she was twelve years old. She's confident that he's only waiting for her eighteenth birthday to ask her to marry him, but she says that if he doesn't, she means to ask him. And if he refuses, she pointed out to her father, he can't do less than consent to sell the other half of the farm to her. She treats that alternative, though, as derisory.--And I haven't a doubt she's right. Evidently her father has none, either.

"Well, it accounts for the change in Mr. Stannard's att.i.tude toward the farm, of course," he concluded. "A son's supposed to thrive on adversity.

It wouldn't be good morals not to make things difficult for him by way of developing his character. But where a mere daughter is involved he can chuckle and write checks. Under his tradition, he's ent.i.tled to regard her as a luxury. Anyhow, your father has nothing more to worry about as far as Rush and Hickory Hill are concerned."

"Life's a kaleidoscope," Mary said. "I'm tired. Let's sit down."--They were half-way up the park by that time.--"Oh, here on the gra.s.s. What does it matter?" When they were thus disposed she went back to her figure. "There's just a little turn, by some big wrist that we don't know anything about, and a little click, and the whole pattern changes."

"There are some patterns that don't change," he said soberly, but he didn't try to argue the point with her. He knew too exactly how she felt.

"Tell me," he said, "what it was that you wanted to talk to me about."

She acknowledged that she'd been hoping he'd forgotten that, of the momentousness of his two items of news had left her, as her talk about kaleidoscopes indicated, rather disoriented. So he threw in, to give her time to get round to it, the information that both Sylvia and the little Williamson girl had decided they wanted to study music with him. "I agreed," he added, "to take them on, when I got around to it."

"Tony," she said, "I won't let you do that. Not music lessons to little girls. I won't."

"Afternoons?" he asked gently. "When I'm through the real day's work? It would be pretty good fun, trying to show a few people--young unspoiled people--what music really is. Dynamite some of their sentimental ideas about it; shake them loose from some of the schoolmasters' niggling rules about it; make them write it themselves; show 'em the big shapes of it; make a piano keyboard something they knew their way about in. That wouldn't be a contemptible job for anybody.--Oh, well, we can talk that out later. But you needn't be afraid for me, my dear."

"That's what I said to Wallace Hood," she told him; "just before lunch.

When I was trying to decide to tell you what he'd been saying.--About your room that they're turning you out of."

With that, she repeated the whole of the talk with Wallace and the serio-fantastic idea that it had led up to.

He grinned over it a while in silence, then asked, "Are you willing to leave it entirely to me?"

"Of course," she said.

"Well, then," he decided, "if I've still got that paper--and I think I have ... I copied it, I remember, out of an old law-book, and to satisfy Luigi's pa.s.sion for the picturesque and the liturgical we took it to a notary and got it sealed with a big red wafer--Well, if I've got it and it's any good, I'll let Aldrich,--is that his name?--make what he can of it. I'll square it with Luigi afterward of course."

"It's a compromise for you," she said gravely. "You wouldn't have done that two weeks ago."

He laughed. "Folks use the word uncompromising as if it were always a praiseworthy thing to be. But it hardly ever is, if you stop to think.

Certainly if life's an art, like composing music or painting pictures, then compromise is in the very fabric of it. Getting different themes or colors that would like to be contradictory, to work together; developing a give and take. What's the important thing? To have a life that's full and good and serviceable, or to mince along through it with two or three sacred att.i.tudes?--Wait a minute."

She waited contentedly enough, watching him with a misty smile as he lay upon the gra.s.s beside her wrestling with his idea.

"All right," he said presently. "Here's the test that I'll agree to. I'll agree to do things or to leave them undone, to the end that when I'm--sixty, say, I'll have packed more of real value into my life--my life as your husband and the father of your children--than that vagabond you're so concerned about would have had in his if--if ..."

"If I hadn't gone to him a week ago last night?" She said it steadily enough, where he could not say it at all.

"Yes," he said. "That's what I mean."

He reached out for her hand and she gave it to him. Presently his face brightened once more into a grin. "I'll even promise to write more music.

Lord, if I've really got anything, you couldn't stop me. Come along.

Father and mother will be looking for us before very long now."

The critics agreed that the _premiere_ of March's opera was a "distinct success," and then proceeded to disagree about everything else. The dean of the corps found it somewhat too heavily scored in the orchestra and the vocal parts rather ungrateful, technically. The reactionary put up his regular plaintive plea for melody but supposed this was too much to ask, these days. The chauvinist detected German influence in the music (he had missed the parodic satire in March's quotations), and asked Heaven to answer why an American composer should have availed himself of a decadent French libretto.

The audience showed a friendly bias toward it at the beginning and were plainly moved by the dramatic power of it as it progressed, but they seemed shocked and bewildered by the bludgeon blows of the conclusion and the curtain fell upon a rather panicky silence. Then they rallied and gave both the performers and the composer what would pa.s.s in current journalese for an ovation.

The Wollastons' friends, who were out in pretty good force, crowded forward to be introduced to Mary's fiance and to offer him their double congratulations. They found him rather unresponsive and decided that he was temperamental (a judgment which did him no serious disservice with most of them), though the kindlier ones thought he might be shy. Mary herself found something not quite accountable in his manner, but she forbore to press for an explanation and let him off, good-humoredly enough, from the little celebration of his triumph which she had had in mind.

The fact was that he had come through the experience, which no one who has not shared it with him can possibly understand, of discovering the enormous difference between the effect of a thing on paper, or even in its last rehearsal, and the effect of it when it is performed before an audience which has paid to see it. It was no wonder he was dazed, for the opera he found himself listening to seemed like a changeling.

He worked all night over it and told LaChaise the next morning that he had made serious alterations in it and would need more rehearsals. The opera had been billed in advance for a repet.i.tion on the following Sat.u.r.day night, the understanding among the powers being that if it failed to get a sufficient measure of favor the bill should be changed.

It was touch and go, but the final decision was that it should have another chance.

So LaChaise agreed to March's request, ran over the composer's revised ma.n.u.script with a subtle French smile, sent for the timpani player, who was an expert copyist, and put him to work getting the altered parts ready, instanter. March told Mary he was making a few changes and asked her to stay away from rehearsals so that on Sat.u.r.day night, from out in front, she might get the full effect.

Really, as it turned out, he did not need any individual testimony, for one could have learned the effect of the new ending from half a mile away. When he came back into the wings from his fourth recall he saw her face shining with joy through her tears. But his heart sank when he saw, standing beside her, Paula. He thanked his G.o.ds that Mary had a sense of humor.

Paula was smiling in high satisfaction, and she spoke first. "Well, stupid," she demanded, "what have you got to say for yourself, now?"

"Not a word," he answered, smiling too, "except that we have to live to learn."

Then he explained to Mary. "That ending--having the girl come back to life again, to sing some more after she'd been shot--was one of the things Paula was trying to make me do, all the while. And some of the other changes were, too."

"But not that trumpet," said Paula, and he could only blush.