yet but she would be coming any minute now. Rush had been
making a great fuss about nothing, anyway. She did not volunteer the
information that Rush had already gone to Lake Geneva.

At five o'clock a telegram, addressed to Rush, had come from Miss
Wollaston. Pete had broken one of the springs of the big car and had had
to go to Durham for another. She hoped Rush and his father would be able
to take care of Mary until to-morrow morning when she would arrive with
one of the servants and take charge.

That cleared the board. To-morrow they would descend upon her with their
fussy attentions, their medical solemnities, their farcical search for
something--for anything except the truth they wouldn't let her tell--to
account for her nervous breakdown. But for a dozen hours she was,
miraculously, to be let alone, with blessed open spaces round her. No
need for any frantic haste. Plenty of time. The whole of that hot still
summer night.

And then, at six o'clock, a man named James Wallace had telephoned! And
Jennie MacArthur had decided to drop in that evening for a visit with
Sarah! Fate had played its part; given March his chance.

"So that's why you decided to go away," he said.

He had been nerving himself during a long slow silence for that. He could
almost as easily have struck her a blow, and indeed the effect of it was
precisely that. But though she tried to shrink away he held her tighter
and went on. "I don't believe there's anything in the whole picture now
that I don't see and understand. But--but the way out ... Oh, Mary
darling, it isn't the one you are trying to take. There's happiness for
both of us if you'll take the other way--with me."

She was struggling now to get free from his hands. "No!" she gasped
wildly. "I won't do that. I'll do anything--_anything_ else rather than
that. Let me go now."

But he held her fast. Presently she relaxed and lay back panting in her
chair. "Won't you please let me go?" she pleaded. "You haven't understood
at all if you don't see that you must. Oh, but you do understand! You've
comforted me ... I didn't think there could be any comfort like that. Let
me go now--in peace. Don't ask the other. I've spoiled things for
everybody else, but I won't for you. I couldn't endure that."

All the pleas, the arguments, the convincing phrases which he had been
mustering while she talked to him so contentedly, to convince her of the
truth, the blinding truth that he wanted her now