mored mockery. He had something that looked like a battered school
atlas in his hand.

"What do you suppose this is?" he asked. "It was lying on the bench in
the hall."

She held out a hand for it and together they opened it on the lid of the
piano and investigated.

"It's the manuscript of his opera," she said. "He brought it around to
leave with Paula. To tell her he had done with it. He's been trying to
spoil it for her but he can't."

"I suppose I made an infernal fool of myself," he remarked, after a
little silence.

She blew, for answer, an impudent smoke ring up into his face.

He continued grumpily to cover his relief that she had not been more
painfully explicit,--"I suppose I shall have to make up some sort of
damned apology to him."

"I don't know," she said. "That's as you like. I don't believe he'd
insist upon it. He understood well enough."

He looked at her intently. "Has there been any better news from father
since I went out?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Except that there's been none. Every hour now that
we aren't sent for counts. What made you think there might have been?"

He said he didn't know. She looked a little more cheerful somehow,
less--tragic. Evidently her visit to the Corbetts had done her good.

His eye fell once more on the manuscript. "Did he go off and forget
that?" he asked. "Or did he mean to leave it for Paula? And what shall we
do with it,--hand it over to her or send it back?"

Thoughtfully Mary straightened the sheets and closed the cover. "I'll
take care of it for him," she said.

CHAPTER XII

HICKORY HILL

Pneumonia, for all it is characterized by what is called a crisis, has no
single stride to recovery, no critical moment when one who has been in
peril passes to safety. Steinmetz and Darby were determined that Mary and
all the household should understand this fully. She had waylaid them in
the hall as they were leaving the house together--this was seventy-two
hours or so after Anthony March's call--and demanded the good news she
was sure they had for her. There was a look about them and a tone in
their voices that were perfectly new.

They would not be persuaded to say that her father was out of danger.
There was very little left of him. His heart had been over-strained and
this abnormal effect was now, in due course, transferred to the kidneys.
All sorts of deadly sequellae were lying in ambush.

But the more discouraging they were, the more