It is that her quarrel with John made
March's opera a rather pleasanter thing to dwell on a little. She had
taken it up in defiance of his wish in the first place; her abandonment
of it had acquired from its context the color of a self-sacrificial
impulse. She would carry out her contract, she had told John down in
Tryon, but she wouldn't sing "Dolores" for anybody. Well, now that her
love-life with John was irremediably wrecked, there was a sort of
melancholy satisfaction in handling, once more, the thing that stood as
the innocent symbol of the disaster.

That's neither here nor there, of course. Paula was totally unaware of
any such constellation about her simple act of deciding to carry down the
score herself instead of handing it over to the maid.

The sight of him standing over the piano in her sitting-room cheered her
and the look of melancholy she brought down-stairs with her was replaced
by a spontaneous unexpected smile. Just as Mary, out at Hickory Hill, had
predicted, she remembered how well she liked him. She laid the manuscript
on the piano in order to give him both hands.

"I can't tell you how pleased I am about it," she said. "I wish you all
the luck in the world."

He brightened responsively at that but looked, she thought, a little
surprised, too.

"I am glad you're pleased about it," he told her. "I wasn't quite sure
you'd know. Of course, they telephoned."

She stepped back, puzzled. "But of course I know!" she said. "Haven't I
been working on it for weeks! Why, it was right here in this room that
they decided on it. Days ago. I've been trying frantically to find you
ever since."

"Oh," he said, "you mean _The Outcry_. I thought you were congratulating
me on my engagement to marry Mary."

She stared at him in simple blank incredulity. "To marry Mary! Mary
Wollaston? You don't mean that seriously?"

"It's the only serious fact in the world," he assured her.

"But John--Does John know about it?" she demanded.

"Yes," he said.

She drew a long breath, then pounced upon him with another question. "Did
you tell him about it, or was it Mary who did?"

"It was I," March said. "I was the first one to see him after it
happened."

"He hadn't suspected anything, had he?" she persisted.

She was vaguely aware that he was a little puzzled and perhaps in the
same degree amused by her intensity, but she had no interest in half
tones of that sort.

When he answered in the sense she expected, "