cessary for her to feel that she's--conquering something."

That last word was barely audible and the quality of the silence which
followed it drew John Wollaston's gaze which had been straying over the
lake, around to the speaker. She had been occupying her hands while she
talked, collecting tiny twigs and acorn cups that happened to be within
reach but now she was tensely still and paler than her wont, he thought.

"You needn't be afraid to say what's in your mind," he assured her.

"It wasn't that," she told him. "I realized that I had been quoting
somebody else. Anthony March said once of Paula that if she had not been
an artist she might have been a _dompteuse_."

John settled himself more comfortably against his tree trunk. A contact
like this with his daughter's mind must have been inexpressibly
comforting to him after a night like the one he had just spent. Its
rectitude; its sensitiveness; the mere feel and texture of it, put his
jangling nerves in tune.

"Is Ware the wild beast she has an inclination to tame in this
instance?" he asked.

"He's nothing but a symbol of it," Mary said. Then she managed to get the
thing a little clearer. "What she'd have done if she'd been like us and
what we'd have had her do--Mr. Whitney and Wallace and I,--would have
been to make a sort of compromise between her position as your wife and a
career as Paula Carresford. We'd have had her sign a contract to sing a
few times this winter with the Metropolitan or the Chicago company, go on
a concert tour perhaps for a few weeks, even give singing lessons or sing
in a church choir. That would probably have been Mr. Whitney's idea.
Rather more than enough to pay her way and at the same time leave as much
of her to you as possible.

"But that's the last thing in the world it would be possible for Paula to
do. She must see a great career on one side,--see herself as Geraldine
Farrar's successor,--and on the other side she must see a perfect
unflawed life with you. So that whichever she chooses she will have a
sense of making the greatest possible sacrifice. She couldn't have said
to you what she did over the telephone if Mr. Ware hadn't convinced her
that a great career was open to her and she couldn't have signed his
contract if it had not involved sacrificing you."

She propped herself back against her hands with a sigh of fatigue.
"There's some of the hair-splitting Paula talks about," she observed.

"It may be fine spun," her