resorting to a pipe he would.

Was there anything else? Didn't he want a pencil and paper to make notes
on? No, he was supplied with everything, he said.

But for all the ardor of these preparations of hers, she was a little
disconcerted and aggrieved at the way he took her at her word and plunged
into the study of his score.

She found herself a novel and managed, for five minutes or so, to pretend
to read. Then she flung it aside and drifted over to the piano bench and
after gazing moodily a while at the keyboard, began in a fragmentary way
to play bits of nothing that came into her head. But she stopped herself
short in manifest contrition when, happening to look around at him, she
saw a knot of baffled concentration in his forehead.

"Of course, you can't read if I do that," she said. "I'm sorry." Then
under cover of the same interruption, "How did John look when you saw him
this morning? Like a wreck? What time was it, anyway? It must have been
frightfully early that he left here because I waked as soon as it was
really light and he was gone by then."

"I don't know that he looked particularly a wreck," March said. "Not any
worse, I mean, than he looked out at Hickory Hill the day you opened the
season here."

"He didn't say anything about me, did he?" she asked.

"No," March said, "I don't think he did."

"I suppose you'd remember it if he'd happened to tell you that he loathed
and hated me and never wanted to see me again." Then she rose and went
over to the opposite side of his little table and leaning down spread her
hands out over his score.

"Oh, I know I said I wouldn't bother, but do stop thinking about this and
talk to me for a minute. We're having--we're having a perfectly hideous
time. He and I. We've been fighting like cat and dog for four days. I
don't exactly know what it's all about, except that it seems we hate each
other and can't go on. You've got to tell me what to do. It all started
with you anyway. With the time you brought around those Whitman
songs.--That was the day Mary came home from New York, too," she added.

"All right," he said, shutting down the cover upon his manuscript,
"then Mary and I will try to patch you up. That is, if we haven't
already done it."

Her face darkened. "Don't try to talk the way they do," she commanded.
"I'm not intelligent enough to take hints. Do you mean that the whole
trouble is that I'm jealous of Mary? And that now she's going to marry
you I'