square with that
explanation. Nor had she said it quite as she would, had she felt that
her husband shared equally in her disappointment. It was all very
intangible, of course, just the way she inflected the sentence, "You see,
I haven't any children." Was it John that didn't want them? Well, he had
two of his own, of course. Had he shrunk from having this new passion of
his domesticated? And then he was a gynecologist. Was he, perhaps, afraid
for her? That explanation had a sort of plausibility about it for Anthony
March. If that were true, his caution had only brought him face to face
with a greater risk. March felt sorry for John Wollaston.

But it quite truly never occurred to him to hold himself in the smallest
degree responsible for the husband's troubles. To a man with a better
developed possessive sense, it might have occurred that he was poaching
in another's preserves. When a husband made it plain that he chose to
keep a particularly rare and valuable possession such as a wife like
Paula must be considered, in the tower of brass LaChaise had talked
about, it became the duty of every other well-disposed male to take pains
to leave no keys, rope ladders or files lying about by which she might
effect her escape. But a consideration of this sort would not even have
been intelligible to March, let alone troublesome.

CHAPTER X

AN INTERVENTION

Mary could not have described the thing there was about old Nat's manner
of going by her door that led her to halt him and inquire what he was up
to. One sees, sometimes, one of his children gliding very innocently
along toward the nearest way out with an effect of held breath that
prompts investigation. In this sixty-year old child, upon whom the terror
of John Wollaston's desperate illness lay more visibly than on any other
member of the household, this look of gusto was especially striking.
Mary's question was prompted by no more serious an impulse than to share
with him a momentary escape from the all-enveloping misery.

But she found old Nat unwilling to share his source of satisfaction with
her. He protested, indeed, with an air of deeply aggrieved innocence,
that nothing of the sort existed. A man was waiting now in the lower hall
who had come to make the customary inquiries. Nat had conveyed them to
Paula and was returning with her answer. This was so flagrantly
disingenuous that Mary smiled.

"Who is the man?" she asked.

The old servant shuffled his