e asked. Then she came up to
March and took him by the arms. "Was it good?" she asked. "Was it--a
little--as you meant it to sound?"

When he did not speak, she laughed,--a rich low laugh that had a hint of
tears in it, pulled him up to her and kissed his cheek. "You don't have
to answer, my dear," she said. "Come in and hear what LaChaise has got to
say about it."

Without effort, irresistibly, she swept him along with her into the
music room.

Mary, when they were gone, let herself out by the other door as softly as
she had come in. She fled down one flight of the stairs and a moment
later had locked the door of her own room behind her. She switched on the
light, gave a ragged laugh at Sir Galahad; then lay down, just as she
was, on the little white bed, her face in the pillow, and cried.

CHAPTER VII

NO THOROUGHFARE

It was hours later, well along toward one o'clock in the morning when
Rush coming into his room saw a light under the door communicating with
his sister's and, knocking, was told he might come in.

He found her in bed for the night, reclining against a stack of pillows
as if she had been reading, but from the way she blinked at the softened
light from the lamp on her night table, it appeared that she had switched
it on only when she heard him coming. She might have been crying though
she looked composed enough now;--symmetrically composed, indeed, a braid
over each shoulder, her hands folded, her legs straight down the middle
of the bed making a single ridge that terminated in a little peak where
her feet stuck up (the way heroines lie, it occurred to Rush, in the last
act of grand operas, when they are dead) and this effect was enhanced by
the new-laundered whiteness of the sheet, neatly folded back over the
blankets and the untumbled pillows.

"You always look so nice and clean," he told her, and, forbearing to sit
on the edge of the bed as a pat of her hand invited him to, pulled up a
chair instead. It was going to be a real talk, not just a casual
good-night chat.

"We were wondering what had become of you," he said. "Poor Graham
was worried."

"Graham!" But she did not follow that up. "I decided we'd had temperament
enough for one evening," she explained in a matter-of-fact tone, "so when
I saw I was going to explode I came away quietly and did it in here. By
the time it was over I thought I might as well go to bed."

"It doesn't look as if you'd exploded very violently," he o