what to think, at last had come to believe that there was only one thing
they could.

"I tried to suggest to her, quite early, before it had gone so far, that
she was in danger of being misunderstood. It only made her furious. And
John was hardly less so when I mentioned to him that I had spoken to her.
He would see nothing; kept a face of granite through it all."

"Aunt Lucile," Mary asked, after a little silence, "do you think she has
really been--unfaithful to father?"

Miss Wollaston hesitated. "Should you consider the conduct I have
described, to be an example of fidelity?"

"I mean, in the divorce court sense," Mary persisted.

"That," her aunt said, more nearly in her old manner than anything that
Mary had yet seen--"that is a matter upon which I have no opinion."

It was a possibility that Mary had contemplated as early as that first
night of all, when Paula, having sung his song, had come herself to
find him in Annie's old bedroom where she had him hidden and with a
broken laugh had pulled him up in her arms and kissed him, unaware that
she was not alone with him. One kiss, as an isolated phenomenon, didn't
mean much, Mary allowed, but when a man and a woman who were going to
be left alone together a lot, started off that way, they were likely
to--get somewhere. And where the man was the composer of that love song
and the woman the singer of it, it was almost a foregone conclusion
that they would.

But this was not the conclusion that she had come to when she stopped
old Nat on his way down-stairs to turn March out of the house. The
evidence, Rush's and Aunt Lucile's, might seem to point that way but it
didn't, somehow, make a convincing picture. I think, though, that in any
case, she would have gone down to see him.

He had found himself a seat on a black oak settee in the hall around the
corner of the stairs and his attitude, when she came upon him, was very
like what it had been the other time, bent forward a little, his hands
between his knees, as if he were braced for something.

"Mrs. Wollaston won't be able to see you to-day," she said. He sprang to
his feet and she added instantly, "I'm her stepdaughter, Mary Wollaston.
Won't you come in?" Without waiting for an answer, she turned and led the
way into the drawing-room.

So far it had been rehearsed, on her way down-stairs, even to the chair
in the bow window which she indicated, having seated herself, for him to
sit down in. She had up to th