rung upon her.

He seemed a little quieter when he came out a few minutes later.
"Whitney left half an hour ago for Lake Geneva," he said. "So she's
missed him if that's where she went. There's nothing to do but wait."

He was very nervous however. Whenever the telephone rang, as it did of
course pretty often, he answered it himself, and each time his
disappointment that it was not Paula asking for him, broke down more or
less the calm he tried to impose upon himself. He essayed what amends
good manners enabled him to make to Mary for his outrageous attack upon
her. It went no deeper than that. The discovery that Paula was gone and
simultaneously that he need not have lost her obliterated--or rather
reversed--the morning's mood completely.

It was after lunch that he said, dryly, "I upset your life for you, half
a dozen years ago. Unfairly. Inexcusably. I've always been ashamed of it.
But it lends a sort of poetic justice to this."

She made no immediate reply, but not long afterward she asked if she
might not go away without waiting for Paula's return. "It would be too
difficult, don't you think?--for the three of us, in a small house
like this."

He agreed with manifest relief. He asked if it was not too late to drive
that afternoon to Hickory Hill, but she said she'd prefer to go by train
anyhow. That was possible she thought.

He did not ask, in so many words, if this was where she meant to go.
There was no other place for her that he could think of.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SUBSTITUTE

It was a good guess of Mary's that Paula had gone to borrow the twenty
thousand dollars but it was to Wallace Hood, not to Martin Whitney, that
she went for it; and thereby illustrated once more how much more
effective instinct is than intelligence.

Martin, rich and generous as he was, originator as he was of the edict
that Paula must go to work, would never have been stampeded as Wallace
was in a talk that lasted less than half an hour, into producing
securities to the amount that Paula needed and offering them up in escrow
for the life of Maxfield Ware's contract.

Wallace was only moderately well off and he was by nature, cautious. His
investments were always of the most conservative sort. This from habit
as well as nature because his job--the only one he had ever had--was
that of estate agent. But Paula's instinct told her that he wouldn't
find it possible to refuse. I think it told her too, though this was a
voic