at point an extraordinarily buoyant sense of
self-possession. This left her for one panicky instant when she felt him
looking at her a little incredulously as if, once more, he wondered
whether she were really there.

"I think, perhaps, you haven't heard of father's illness," she began--not
just as she had expected to. "Or did you come to ask about him?"

"No," he said. "I hadn't heard. Is it--yes, of course it must
be--serious. I'm sorry."

She was struck by the instantaneous change in his manner. From being,
part of him, anyhow, a little remote--wool-gathering would have been Aunt
Lucile's term--he was, vividly, here. It wasn't possible to doubt the
reality of his concern. As a consequence, when she began informing him of
the state of things she found herself pulled away, more and more, from
the impersonal phraseology of a medical bulletin. She told how the attack
had come on; how they had put up a bed for him in the music room, where
there was the most air, and begun what it was evident from the first
would be a life-and-death struggle; she quoted what Rush had told her
when he met the train. "I agree with Rush," she concluded. "They let me
see him, for a few minutes, this morning, just so he'd know that I had
come back. Yet it isn't possible not to believe that he will get well."

When she had squeezed away the tears that had dimmed her eyes, she saw
that his own were bright with them. "He's more than just a great man," he
said gravely. Then, after a moment's silence, "If there's anything I can
do... It would be a great privilege to be of service to him. As errand
boy, any sort of helper. I had some hospital experience at Bordeaux."

It was, on the face of it, just such an offer as any kindly disposed
inquirer would have made. Such as Wallace Hood, for example, had, in
fact, made, only rather more eloquently less than an hour ago. But Mary's
impulse was not to answer as she had answered Wallace with a mere polite
acknowledgment of helpless good intentions. In fact, she could find, for
the moment, no words in which to answer him at all.

He said then, "I mustn't keep you."

Even in response to that she made no movement of release. "There's
nothing, even for me to do," she said, and felt from the look this drew
from him that he must, incredibly, have caught from her some inkling of
what her admission really meant.

He did not repeat his move to go, nor speak, and there was silence
between them for, perhaps, th