as Madame
Carresford's husband, she turned away and went back to the car.

For the moment the spectacle of her father in the role of a young lover
touched her no more acutely than with a mild half-humorous melancholy.
She even paid the tribute of a passing smile to the queer reversal of
their roles, her own and his. She was more like a mother brooding over
the first love-affair of an adolescent son. It was so young of him,
younger, she believed, than any act she herself could be capable of, to
have come to Paula's performance without letting her know and waited
shyly alone in the dark while the herd of her acquaintances crowded in
and monopolized her. Pathetically young, almost intolerably pathetic in
a man in his middle fifties. She wondered if he had come up for _Tosca_
the night before and gone away without a word.

She had spoken quite without authority in assuring him of Paula's
welcome. Paula had not, she thought, spoken of him once either in
connection with her disappointment the night before or with her triumph
to-night. Yet that he would get a lover's welcome she had very little
doubt. It was his moment certainly. Paula left alone up there at last,
sated with an overwhelming success, tired, relaxed...

With an effort of will Mary settled herself a little more deeply in the
seat behind the wheel and lighted a cigarette. She hated having to wait,
having to be found waiting when they came down together. She wished she
could just--disappear. It wasn't possible, of course.

It was not very long before they came down. "She says I may stay two
days," John told Mary as they squeezed into their seats in the little
roadster. "Then, relentlessly, she's going to turn me out." But his voice
was beyond disguise that of a lover who has prospered.

Mary drove them in almost unbroken silence all the way, down the ravine
road and up through the woods to the house in the village. Then she went
on with the car to their garage which stood in a yard of a neighbor, two
or three doors away. She rejected with curt good-humor her father's offer
to help her with this job. It was what she always did by herself, she
said, and took a momentary perverse pleasure, which she despised herself
for, in the obvious fact that this troubled him.

Back in the cottage living-room, ten minutes later perhaps, she found him
alone and heard then, the explanation of his having come. They had got
the Sunday papers out at Hickory Hill as usual in the mi