“I should have to go back,” she said, “if I were going to sing March’s opera.  There is such a lot of work about a new production that there would be no time to spare.”

“But,” he asked, “isn’t March’s opera precisely what you are going to sing?”

“No,” she said rebelliously.  “It’s not.  There wasn’t anything in the contract about that.  I’ll carry out the contract this summer.  I’ll keep my word and yours, since that is what you want me to do.  But I won’t sing ‘Dolores’ for anybody.”

He did not press her for the reason.

After a little silence, she said, “Lucile thought I’d fallen in love with him.  So did Rush, I guess,—­and poor old Nat.  Did you, John?”

“I tried to, hard enough,” he confessed.

She stared.  “Tried to!”

“That would have been the easier thing to fight,” he said.  “There’s nothing inevitable about a man,—­any man.  I’d have stood a chance at least, of beating him, even though he had a twenty-year handicap or so.  But the other thing,—­well, that was like the first bar of the Fifth Symphony, you know; Fate knocking at the door.  Clear terror that is until one can get the courage to open the door and invite Fate in.”

CHAPTER XV

THE END OF IT

About a week later—­just at the beginning of June, this was—­Paula did go back to Chicago, leaving her husband to go on gaining the benefit, for another ten days or so, of that wine-like mountain air.  It was an unwelcome conviction that he really wanted her to go, rather than any crying need for her at Ravinia that decided her to leave him.  The need would not be urgent for at least another fortnight since it had been decided between her and LaChaise that she should make her debut in Tosca, an opera she had sung uncounted times.

Since their momentous conversation in which John had attempted to revise the fundamentals of their life together, they had not reverted to the main theme of it; had clarified, merely, one or two of its more immediate conclusions.  Paula was to carry out in spirit as well as in letter the terms of her Ravinia contract exactly as if it were still to be regarded as the first step of her reopened career.  What she should do about the second step in case it offered itself to her was a bridge not to be crossed until they came to it.

John had professed himself content to let it remain at that, but she divined that there was something hollow in his profession.  It was possible, of course, that his restlessness represented nothing more than a new stage in his convalescence.  It didn’t seem possible that after the candors of that talk he could still be keeping something back from her.  Yet that was an impression she very clearly got.  Anyhow, her presence was doing him no good, and on that unwelcome assurance, she bade him a forlorn farewell and went home.

It was a true intuition.  John heaved a sigh of relief when she was gone.  In his present enfeebled state she was too much for him.  The electrical vitality of her overpowered him.  Even before his illness he had had moments—­I think I have recorded one of them—­when her ardent strength paralyzed him with a sort of terror and these moments were more frequent now.