"But, Rush, you've _seen_ her!"

"Only that once, at the wedding. She was made up to look young then, of course. Painted and dyed and so on, I suppose. I felt so embarra.s.sed and silly over the whole thing--being just a kid--that I hardly looked at her. And that was a long while ago."

Mary laughed at that, though she knew it would annoy him. "She never paints nor dyes nor anything, Ruddy. She doesn't have to. She's such a perfectly raving beauty without it. And she's more beautiful now than she was then. She really is young, you see. Hardly enough older than we are to matter, now that we're grown up."

She saw Rush digesting this idea of a beautiful young stepmother whom he was to be privileged to call--straight off--by her first name, with a certain satisfaction, so she waited--rather conscious that she was being patient--for him to come back from the digression of his own accord.

Presently he did.

"What does she do that you don't like?"

"She does nothing that isn't perfectly nice, and good-tempered, and--respectable," Mary a.s.sured him, and added on a warmer note, "Oh, and she's really amiable and lovely. I was being a cat. But I am truly fond of her--when I have her to myself. It's when she's with father ..."

She broke off there, seeing that she could not make that clear to him (how could she since she would not state it in plain terms to herself?) and hurried on, "It's really father whom I don't get on with, any more.

He worries about me and feels sorry for me and wants me to come home. But I'm nothing to him when I do come--but an embarra.s.sment.--No, it _isn't_ rot. He knows it himself and feels horrid about it and raises my allowance when I go away, though it was foolishly big already; and then, as soon as I'm back here he begins worrying again, and urging me to come home. He didn't insist as long as I was doing war work, but now that that's played out, I suppose he will.

"Oh, I know well enough what I ought to do. I ought to answer some advertis.e.m.e.nt for a typist--I can do that, but not stenography--and take a regular job. The sort you said you'd shoot Mr. Whitney for offering you. And then I ought to take a hall bedroom somewhere in the cross-town twenties and live on what I earned. That's the only thing I can see, and, Rush, I simply haven't the courage to do it. It seems as if I couldn't do it."

His lively horror at the bare suggestion of such a thing drew her into a half-hearted defense of the project. Numbers of the girls she knew down here who had been doing war work were going enthusiastically into things like that--or at least were announcing an invincible determination to do so. Only they were cleverer than she at that sort of thing and could hope for better jobs. They were in luck. They liked it--looked forward to a life of it as one full of engaging possibilities. But to Mary it was nothing, she hardly pretended, but a forlorn last shift. If one couldn't draw nor write nor act nor develop some clever musical stunt, what else was there for a girl to do?

"Well, of course," said Rush, in a very mature philosophical way and lighting a cigarette pretty deliberately between the words,--"of course, what most girls do, is--marry somebody." Then he stole a look around at his sister to see how she had taken it.

There was a queer look that almost frightened him in her blue eyes. Her lips, which were trembling, seemed to be trying to smile.

"That's father's idea," she said raggedly. "He's as anxious now that I should marry somebody--anybody, as he was that I shouldn't five years ago--before he found Paula. You see I am so terribly--left on his hands."

There was, no doubt, something comical about the look of utter consternation she saw on her brother's face, but she should not have tried to laugh at him for a sob caught the laugh in the middle and swept away the last of her self-control. She flung herself down upon the divan and buried her face in one of the pillows. He had seen men cry like that but, oddly enough, never a woman. What he did though was perhaps as much to the point as anything he could have done. He sat down beside her and gathered her up tight in his arms and held her there without a word until the tempest had blown itself out. When the sobs had died away to nothing more than a tremulous catch in each indrawn breath, he let her go back among the pillows and turn so that she could look up at him. By that time the sweat had beaded out upon his forehead, and his hands, which had dropped down upon her shoulders, were trembling.

"Well," she asked unsteadily. "What do you think of me now?"

He wanted to bend down and kiss her but wisely he forbore. "It's easy to see what's the matter," he said. "This war business you have been doing has been too much for you. You're simply all in." Then happily he added, "I'd call you a case of sh.e.l.l-shock."

She rewarded that with a washed-out smile. "What's the treatment going to be?" she asked.

"Why," he said, "as soon as I'm done tucking you up properly in this eiderdown quilt, I'm going out to your icebox and try to find the makings of an egg-nog. Incidentally, I shall scramble up all the rest of the eggs I find and eat them myself. And then I'll find something dull to read to you until you go to sleep. When it's dark enough so that my evening clothes won't attract too much attention, I'll go back and get into uniform; then I'll buy two tickets for Chicago on the fast train to-morrow, and two tickets for a show to-night; and then I'll come back and take you out to dinner. Any criticisms on that program?"

"Not just for this minute," she said contentedly. "I don't know whether I'm going to Chicago with you, tomorrow, or not."

"That's all right," he said. "I know all about that." He added, "I hope the other girl won't mind--the one who lives here with you. What was her name?"

"Ethel Holland? Oh, she went over to France with the Y.M.C.A. just about a year ago. I've tried to find somebody to take her place, but there didn't seem to be any one I liked well enough. So I've been living alone."

She saw his face stiffen at that but his only comment was that that simplified matters.

CHAPTER IV

THE PICTURE PUZZLE

There was a good quarter of an hour beginning with the tear-blurred moment when Mary caught sight of her father looking for her and Rush down the railway station platform, during which the whole fabric of misgivings about her home-coming dissolved as dreams do when one wakes. It had not been a dream she knew, nor the mere concoction of her morbid fancy. He had not looked at her like this nor kissed her like this--not once since that fatal journey to Vienna five years ago. Had something happened between him and Paula that made the difference? Or was it her brother's presence, that, serving somehow to take off the edge, worked a mysterious catalysis?

When John, after standing off and gazing wordless for a moment at this new son of his, this man he had never seen, in his captain's uniform with bits of ribbon on the breast of it,--tried to say how proud he was and choked instead, it was for Mary that he reached out an unconscious, embracing arm, the emotion which would not go into words finding an outlet for itself that way.

When they got out to the motor and old Pete, once coachman, now chauffeur, his eyes gleaming over the way Rush had all but hugged him, said to her, "You home to stay, too, Miss Mary?" her father's hand which clasped her arm revealed the thrilling interest with which he awaited her answer to that question. The importunity of the red-cap with the luggage relieved her of the necessity for answering but the answer in her heart just then was "Yes."

It was with a wry self-scornful smile that she recalled, later that day, the emotions of the ride home. If at any time before they got to the house, her father had repeated the old servant's question, "Are you home to stay, Mary?" she would, she knew, have kissed the hand that she held clasped in hers, wept blissfully over it and told him she wanted never to go away again. She hadn't minded his not asking because she thought she knew quite surely why he had not. He was afraid to risk his momentary happiness upon her answer. And why had she not volunteered the a.s.surance he wanted so eagerly and dared not ask for? The beastly answer to that question was that she had enjoyed the thrill of his uncertainty--a miserable sort of feline coquetry.

Well, it had been short-lived, that little triumph of hers. It had stopped against a blank wall just when the car stopped under the _ports cochere_ of the Dearborn Avenue house. John's arm which had been around her was withdrawn and he looked with just a touch of ostentation at his watch. She knew before he spoke that when he did, his tone would ring flat. The old spell was broken. He was once more under the dominion of the newer, stronger one.

"I'm terribly late," he said. "I must drive straight along to the hospital. I'll see you to-night. We're having a few old friends in to dinner. Run along now. Your Aunt Lucile will be waiting for you."

His omission to mention Paula had been fairly palpable. Her reply, "All right, dad, till to-night, then. _Au 'voir_" had been, she knew, as brittle and sharp-edged as a bit of broken gla.s.s. It had cut him;--she had meant it to.

Well it served her right. Paula deserved to own the stronger spell.

Paula's emotional channels were open and deep. No choking snags and sandbars, no perverse eddies in them. Look at her with Rush to-day! There was a situation that fairly bristled with opportunities for blundering.

She might, with this grown-up son of her husband's whom she had hardly seen, have shown herself shy, embarra.s.sed, at a loss how to take him. She might have tried to be archly maternal with him or elder-sisterly. But she played up none of these sentimental possibilities, seemed, indeed, serenely unaware of them. She treated him just as she had always treated Mary--as a contemporary. From the beginning she had no trouble making him talk. For one thing her acquaintance with France and Germany was intimate enough to enable her to ask him questions which he found it pleasantly stimulating to try to answer. As she felt her way to firmer ground with him, she allowed what was evidently a perfectly spontaneous affection to irradiate the look she turned upon him and to warm her lovely voice.

So she must have begun--as simply and irresistibly as that--in Vienna!

Mary tried hard to think of it as a highly skillful performance, but this was an att.i.tude she could not maintain. It was not a performance at all; it was--just Paula, who, having taken her father away from her was now, inevitably, going to take her brother too. Not because she meant to--quite unconscious that she was doing any harm ("and of course she isn't, except to a cat like me")--that was the maddening, and at the same time, endearing thing about her.

For there was a broad impartiality about her spell that tugged at Mary even while she forlornly watched Rush yielding to it. And the way it affected Aunt Lucile was simply funny. She melted, visibly, like a fragment left on the curb by the iceman, whenever Paula--turned the current on. What made this the more striking was that Aunt Lucile's normal mood to-day impressed Mary as rather aggressively sell-contained.

Was it just that Mary had forgotten how straight she sat and how precisely she moved about? Had she always had that discreet significant air, as if there were something she could talk about but didn't mean to--not on any account? Or was there something going on here at home that awaited--breathlessly awaited--discovery? Whatever it was, when Paula turned upon her it went, laughably;--only it would have been a pretty shaky sort of laugh.

It was after lunch that Paula electrified them by suggesting that they all go together to a matinee. That's an ill.u.s.tration of the power she had. To each of the three, to Lucile and to Mary as well as to the now infatuated Rush, she could make a commonplace scheme like that seem an irresistibly enticing adventure. Lucile recovered her balance first, but it was not until Nat had fetched the morning paper and they had discussed their choice of entertainments for two or three minutes that she said of course she couldn't go. She didn't know what she'd been thinking of. The number of things imperatively to be done or seen to in preparation for the party to-night would keep her busy all the afternoon.

Then Mary followed suit. If this was really going to be a party--she hadn't quite got this idea before--she'd have to spend the afternoon unpacking and putting her frocks in order or she wouldn't have anything to wear.

"Well," Paula said comfortably, "until they turn me on like a Victrola at nine o'clock or so, I've nothing to do with the party except not think about it." She made this observation at large, then turned on Rush.

"You'll come with me, won't you, and keep me from getting frightened until tea-time?"

Rush would go--rather!--but he laughed at the word "frightened."

"I'm not joking," she said, and reaching out she covered his hand, which rested on the cloth, with one of hers.

He flushed instantly at that; then said to the others with slightly elaborated surprise, "It _is,_ cold, for a fact."

"So is the other one," said Paula. "For that matter, so are my feet. And getting colder every minute. Come along or we'll be late."

Mary branded this as a bit of rather crude coquetry. It wasn't conceivable that a professional opera singer of Paula's experience could look forward with any sort of emotion to the mere singing of a few songs to a group of familiar friends. It occurred to her, too, that Paula had calculated on her refusal to go to the matinee as definitely as on Aunt Lucile's and for a moment she indulged the idea of changing her mind and going along with them just to frustrate this design. Only, of course, it wouldn't work that way. She couldn't keep Rush from being taken away from her by playing the spoil-sport. She couldn't keep him anyhow she supposed. She made a hasty, rather forlorn retreat to her own room as soon as the departing pair were safely out of the house.

That room of hers exerted now a rather curious effect upon her mood. It had been hers ever since her promotion from the nursery and it, like her brother's adjoining, had been kept unchanged, unoccupied during her long absence.

The furniture and the decoration of it had been her mother's last Christmas present. The first Mrs. Wollaston had lived under the influence of the late Victorian esthetes, and Mary's room looked as if it had been designed for Elaine the lily maid of Astolat, an effect which was heightened by a large brown picture in a broad brown frame of Watts' Sir Galahad. After her mother's death, that winter, Mary added a Botticelli Madonna, the one with the pomegranate, which she hung by itself on a wall panel. There was a narrow black oak table under it to carry a Fra Angelico triptych flanked by two tall candlesticks. It wasn't exactly a shrine, even if there was a crimson cushion conveniently disposed before it, and if Mary for a while said her prayers there instead of in the old childish way at her bedside, and if she genuflected when she pa.s.sed it, that was her own affair.

Coming to it now, as to port after storms, with the intention almost openly avowed to herself of lying down upon the bed and, for an hour or two, feeling as sorry for herself as she could, she found an appalling strangeness about its very familiarity that pulled her up short. The abyss she stared into between herself and the Mary Wollaston whose image was so sharply evoked by the ridiculously unchanged paraphernalia of that Mary's life, turned her giddy. Even the face which looked back at her from the frame of that mirror seemed the other Mary's rather than her own.