ween her and father, whether it was my doing or not, she
would hate me with her whole heart."

Had that prediction been justified? There were half a dozen phrases that
Paula had allowed herself to use this afternoon, which added up to a
reasonable certainty that it was altogether justified. It was not easy
for him to admit to himself that he didn't like Paula; that he knew her
and had long known her for a person incapable of following any lead save
that of her own primitive straightforward desires.

His self-communings reached down deeper into him than they had done for
many a long year. He convicted himself, before his vigil was over, of
flagrant cowardice in having allowed Mary to undertake the burden of that
revelation. What harm would it have done any one, even himself, beyond an
hour's discomfort, to have drawn down Paula's lightnings on his own head?
Her enmity, even though it were permanent, could not seriously have
changed the tenor of his ways.

But to Mary, such a thing could easily be a first-class disaster. Could
John be relied upon to come whole-heartedly to her defense. No, he could
not. Indeed--this was the thought that made Wallace gasp as from a dash
of cold water in the face--John's anger at this interference with his
affairs and at the innocent agent of it was likely to be as hot as his
wife's. Momentarily anyhow. What a perfectly horrible situation to have
forced the girl into;--that fragile sensitive young thing!

And now above all other times, when, for some reason not fully known to
him, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing to
manage. He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how she
had flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tense
emotion if he couldn't find her a job. It had been that very night,
hadn't it?--when Paula had given that recital of Anthony March's
songs--that she had disappeared out of the midst of things and never come
back during the whole evening. When one considered her courage a flight
like that told a good deal.

Then there had been that something a little short of an engagement with
Graham Stannard, which must have distressed her horribly;--any one with a
spirit as candid as hers and with as honest a hatred of all that was
equivocal. The family had seemed to think that it would all come out
right in the end somehow, yet the last time she had talked with him she
had said, cutting straight through the disguise h