gratulations in person had begun. After the _Tosca_, performance
she had been adamant about seeing anybody but to-night with a laugh she
said, "I don't care. For a few minutes. If they're people I really know."

So Mary took her station beside the Rhadamanthus at the stockade gate--in
a proper opera-house, he would have been the stage door-keeper--to pick
out the sheep from the goat-like herd of the merely curious who, but for
firm measures, would have stormed the place. Those who came down again,
pushed out by the weight of new arrivals, lingered about the gate talking
things over with Mary. It amused her to see how radically their attitude
had changed. Such people as the Averys, the Cravens and the Byrnes, who
in a social way had known Paula well, seemed to regard her now as a
personage utterly remote, translated into another world altogether. And
when they asked about John Wollaston, as most of them did, there was an
undertone almost of commiseration about their inquiries, though on the
surface this didn't go beyond an expressed regret that he hadn't been
here to witness the triumph.

Mary drove them all away at last, even the lingerers in Paula's
dressing-room, left her safely in the hands of her dresser and went out
into the automobile park to get her car. Coming up softly across the
grass and reaching in to turn on the lights, she was startled to discover
that there was a man in it. But before she had time more than to gasp,
she recognized him as her father.

"I didn't want to push my way in with the mob," he explained, after
apologizing for having frightened her. "The car, when I spotted it,
seemed a safe place to wait. And the privacy of it," he added, "will be
grateful, too, since I'm not perfectly sure that Paula won't refuse
outright to see me."

Mary smiled at this and said she hoped he hadn't missed the performance.

"No," he told her somberly, "I didn't miss--any of it." Then on a
different note, "Now we'll see whether those dogs of critics won't change
their tune."

"Paula herself changed the tune," Mary observed. Then, "She's longing to
see you, of course. And there's no reason why you should wait. No one's
with her now except her dresser."

She led the way, without giving him a chance to demur, to the gate to the
stockade and turned him over to the gatekeeper.

"Please take Doctor Wollaston up to his wife's dressing-room," she said.
And with a momentary pleasure in having evaded introducing him