began to work, he merely stared. The first thought that struggled through
was a reluctant recognition of the fact that there was a sort of dignity
in the man which not even the stale look, inevitable about one who has
just slept in his clothes, could overcome. No more than his pallor and
the lines of fatigue deeply marked in his face could impeach his air of
authority. There was something to him not quite accountable under any of
the categories John was in the habit of applying. So much John had
conceded from the first; from that morning in this very room when he had
found him tuning the Circassian grand and had gone away, shutting the
door over yonder, so that Paula shouldn't hear.

But that Mary should seriously contemplate marrying him! Mary! Good God!

Once more March disengaged himself from John's fixed gaze. Not at all
as if he couldn't support it; gently again, by way of giving the older
man time to recover from his astonishment. He went into the bay and
stood looking out the window into the bright hot empty street. From
where he sat John could see his face in profile. He certainly was
damned cool about it.

There recurred to John's mind, a moment during that day's drive he had
taken with Mary, down South, when he had leaped to the wild surmise that
there might be something between those two. She'd been talking about the
piano tuner with what struck him as a surprisingly confident
understanding.

She had instantly, he remembered, divined his thought and as swiftly
set it at rest. March wasn't, she had said, a person who saved himself
up for special people. He was there for anybody, like a public
drinking fountain.

But had she been ingenuous in making that reply to him? Had he really
been in her confidence about the man? Obviously not. The only encounter
between them that he had ever heard about was the one she had upon that
day described to him. And Lucile and Rush were evidently as completely in
the dark about the affair as he himself had been. Their meetings, their
numerous meetings, must have been clandestine. That Mary, his own white
little daughter, should be capable of an affair like that!

Another memory flashed into his mind. The evening of that same day when
she had tried to tell him why she couldn't marry Graham. She wasn't, she
had said, innocent enough for Graham; she wasn't even quite--good.

The horror of the conclusion he seemed to be drifting upon literally, for
a moment, nauseated John Wo