'Dolores' for anybody."

He did not press her for the reason.

After a little silence, she said, "Lucile thought I'd fallen in love with
him. So did Rush, I guess,--and poor old Nat. Did you, John?"

"I tried to, hard enough," he confessed.

She stared. "Tried to!"

"That would have been the easier thing to fight," he said. "There's
nothing inevitable about a man,--any man. I'd have stood a chance at
least, of beating him, even though he had a twenty-year handicap or so.
But the other thing,--well, that was like the first bar of the Fifth
Symphony, you know; Fate knocking at the door. Clear terror that is until
one can get the courage to open the door and invite Fate in."

CHAPTER XV

THE END OF IT

About a week later--just at the beginning of June, this was--Paula did go
back to Chicago, leaving her husband to go on gaining the benefit, for
another ten days or so, of that wine-like mountain air. It was an
unwelcome conviction that he really wanted her to go, rather than any
crying need for her at Ravinia that decided her to leave him. The need
would not be urgent for at least another fortnight since it had been
decided between her and LaChaise that she should make her debut in
_Tosca_, an opera she had sung uncounted times.

Since their momentous conversation in which John had attempted to revise
the fundamentals of their life together, they had not reverted to the
main theme of it; had clarified, merely, one or two of its more immediate
conclusions. Paula was to carry out in spirit as well as in letter the
terms of her Ravinia contract exactly as if it were still to be regarded
as the first step of her reopened career. What she should do about the
second step in case it offered itself to her was a bridge not to be
crossed until they came to it.

John had professed himself content to let it remain at that, but she
divined that there was something hollow in his profession. It was
possible, of course, that his restlessness represented nothing more than
a new stage in his convalescence. It didn't seem possible that after the
candors of that talk he could still be keeping something back from her.
Yet that was an impression she very clearly got. Anyhow, her presence was
doing him no good, and on that unwelcome assurance, she bade him a
forlorn farewell and went home.

It was a true intuition. John heaved a sigh of relief when she was
gone. In his present enfeebled state she was too much for him. The