There was, too, a real effort involved in presenting ideas to her (intellectual ideas, if they may be so distinguished from emotional ones).  He didn’t know, now, whether she had fully understood what he had been driving at that day; whether anything had really got through to her beyond a melancholy realization that his love had cooled.  He had always been aware of this effort, but in the days of his strength he hadn’t minded making it.

Now he was conscious of wishing for some one like Mary,—­indeed, for Mary herself.  They talked the same language, absolutely.  Their minds had the same index of refraction, so that thoughts flashed back and forth between them effortlessly and without distortion.  He thought of her so often and wished for her so much during the first two days of his solitude that it seemed almost a case for the psychical research people when he got a telegram from her.

It read:  “Aunt Lucile worried you left alone especially traveling.  Shall you mind or will Paula if I come down and bring you back, Mary.”

There was a situation made clear, at all events.  He grinned over it as he despatched his wire to her.  “Perfectly unnecessary but come straight along so that we can play together for a week or two before starting home.”

Play together is just what they did.  Enough of his strength soon came back to make real walks possible and during the second week, with a two-horse team and a side-bar buggy, they managed, without any ill effect upon him, an excursion across the valley and up the opposite mountainside to a log cabin road-house where they had lunch.

Mary, a born horsewoman, did the driving herself, thus relieving them of the impediment to real companionship which a hired driver would have been.  In an inconsecutive, light-hearted way difficult to report intelligibly, they managed to tell each other a lot.  She let him see, with none of the rhetorical solemnities which a direct statement would have involved, her new awareness of his professional eminence.  A dozen innuendoes, as light as dandelion feathers, conveyed it to him; swift brush-strokes of gesture and inflection sketched the picture in; an affectionate burlesque of awe completed it, so that he could laugh at her for it as she had meant he should.

She told him during their drive what the source of her illumination was; described Anthony March’s visit on that most desperate day of all, the vividness of his concern over the outcome of the fight and his utter unconcern about the effect of it upon his own fortunes.  She had been reading Kipling aloud, out at the farm, to the boys and Aunt Lucile and a memory of it led her to make a comparison—­heedless of its absurdity—­between the composer and Kirn’s lama.  “He isn’t, anyhow, tied to the ‘wheel of things’ any more than that old man was.”

“I’d like to have come down that day and heard him talk,” John said.  “Because it’s the real thing, with him.  Not words.  He wouldn’t be a bad person to go to,” he added musingly, “if one had got himself into a real impasse—­or what looked like one.  Paula has chucked his opera, you know.”