it."

Mary stood between her and the door. "Don't you think it would be--fairer
to wait?" she asked; "before you signed a thing like that. Until at
least, you were no longer angry with me for having told you too much or
with father because he had told you too little."

Paula pulled up at that and stood looking at her stepdaughter with a
thoughtful expression that was almost a smile. "I am angry," she
admitted, "or I was, and just exactly about that. It's queer the way you
Wollastons, you and your father, anyhow, are always--getting through to
things like that. What you say is fair enough. I guess you're always
fair. Can't help being, somehow. But I can't put off telephoning to Max.
You see I called up John at Hickory Hill an hour ago. I told him I had
made up my mind to stop singing. I told him I didn't want any career.
That I just wanted to--belong to him. And I asked him to come to me as
fast as he could. He's on the way now. So it's important, you see, that
Max should get here first."

CHAPTER XX

TWO WOMEN AND JOHN

Paula seemed calm enough after that one explosion but she moved along
toward the accomplishment of her purpose, to get herself thoroughly
committed to Max before John's arrival, with the momentum of a liner
leaving its pier. Mary made two or three more attempts at dissuasion but
their manifest futility kept her from getting any real power into them.
She was, to tell the truth, in a panic over the prospect of that
evening;--her father arriving triumphant in Paula's supposed surrender to
find Maxfield Ware with his five years' contract in his pocket. And the
responsibility for the disaster would be attributed to herself; was
indeed so attributable with a kind of theatrical completeness seldom, to
be found in life. It didn't often happen that any one was as entirely to
blame for a calamity to some one else as Mary was for this _volte-face_
of Paula's.

She did not run away altogether. Paula, indeed, didn't know that she had
fled at all, for Maxfield Ware's tardiness about coming back the second
time supplied her with a pretext.

It was nearly eight o'clock before he came and Paula, who was momentarily
expecting John's arrival by then, was in an agony of impatience to sign
his papers and get him out of the house again. Ware may have divined her
wish and loitered out of mischievous curiosity as to the cause of it. Or
he may, merely, have been prolonging an experience which he found
agreeable.