both on
fire to get back to Paris into the thick of things. Almost any round
sum, in absolutely spot cash, would satisfy them. So Rodney, too busy
with other things to take the trouble to invest his money, would have
been in a position to get the house cheap. It was Constance's opinion
that he had.

"Do you know anybody in the world," her husband demanded, "less likely
to be interested in a bargain than Rodney? Or to pick a thing up because
it is cheap?"

"Well, then," Constance said, "you must think he's expecting Rose,
sometime or other, to come back to him. Because if he meant to get a
divorce and marry some one else, he certainly wouldn't want to live in
that house with her. He'd want as few reminders as possible, not as
many. And yet, it was Rose herself, according to Harriet, who was so
anxious, toward the last, to get rid of the place. So there you are!
It's a mystery any way you take it."

John Williamson said he understood, though when Violet pressed him for
an explanation he was a little vague.

"Why," he said, "it's just a polite way of telling us all to go to the
devil. He knows we're all talking our heads off about him, and
sympathizing with him, and wondering what he's going to do, and he buys
that house to serve notice that he's going to stay put. Business as
usual at the old stand. I shouldn't be surprised if he meant the same
message for Rose. That is to say, that the place will always be there
for her to come back to."

Outside their immediate circle, no such imaginative explanations were
resorted to. Rose was coming back of course. And the interesting theme
for speculation was what would happen to her when she did. Would she try
to take her old place; ignore the past; treat that outrageous escapade
with the Globe chorus as if it had never happened? And if she did try to
do that, could she succeed? It all depended on what a few people did. If
they, the three or four supremely right ones, were to acquiesce in this
treatment of the situation, Rose could, more or less, get away with it.
Although even then, things could never be quite the same.

But the sterility of these speculations gradually became apparent as the
winter months slipped away and Rose did not come back. It was felt,
though such a feeling would have looked absurd if put into words, that
by failing to come when the stage was set for her, as by Rodney's act in
purchasing the McCrea house it was, missing her cue like that, letting
th