mands that he persistently refused to
comply with. And she took this refusal rather hard; acted more hurt than
angry about it, to be sure, but came back to it again and again. When she
discovered that he made no pretense of living at his father's house, she
asked for his real address so that she could always be sure of getting
at him when she wanted him. This he would not give her. If he did, he
said, it would only result in his staying away from there and doing his
work somewhere else. It was one of his simple necessities to know that he
couldn't be got at. He would make every possible concession. Would go, or
telephone, at punctiliously regular and brief intervals, to his father's
house to learn whether she had sent for him, but give up the secrecy of
his lair he would not. It wasn't possible.

I think she compensated herself for this refusal by sending for him
sometimes when she did not really need him, just to be on the safe side,
and, on the same basis, engaged his attendance ahead from day to day.
Anyhow, she occupied, in one way or another, practically the whole of his
time; and the dumb little blue-eyed princess knocked at his door in vain.
Only in those hours when sheer fatigue had sent him to bed had she any
opportunity of visiting him. Sometimes she made white nights for him by
haunting those hours, refusing to go away; sometimes, by not coming at
all, she filled him with terror lest she had gone for good--would not
come back even when he was ready for her. When that panic was upon him he
hated Paula with a devouring hatred.

Of the human original of his blue-eyed princess, he saw during those
weeks, nothing. On that first Sunday when he lunched at the house he
heard them speak of a member of the family, a daughter of John Wollaston,
named Mary, who had been living in New York and had recently returned but
was not lunching at home that day. He got the idea then that she might be
the girl who had so mysteriously come in and sat beside him while Paula
sang; and without any evidence whatever to support this surmise, it
became a settled conviction. But an odd shrinking, almost superstitious,
as he had confessed to Jennie, from doing anything that might break the
spell kept him from asking any questions.

During the first week of his almost daily visits to the house, he got
repeated intimations of her, a glimpse once through an open door on the
third floor into a room that struck him as being, probably, hers. The