She nodded, evidently not in the least surprised and, no more, perturbed by this intelligence.  “He won’t mind that,” she explained.  “The only thing he really needs, in the world, is to hear his music, but this, you see, wasn’t his any more.  He had been trying to make it Paula’s.  He had been working over it rather hopelessly, because he had promised, but it was like letting him out of school when he found that she had forgotten all about him;—­didn’t care if she never saw him again.”

She caught, without an explanatory word, the meaning of the glance her father turned upon her, and went straight on.  “Oh, it seems a lot, I know, to have found out about him in one short talk, but there’s nothing—­personal in that.  He doesn’t, I mean—­save himself up for special people.  He’s there for anybody.  Like a public drinking fountain, you know.  That’s why he would be such a wonderful person—­to go to, as you said.  No one could possibly monopolize him.”

She added, after a silence, “It seems a shame, when he wants so little that he can’t have that.  Can’t hear, for example, that opera of his the way he really wrote it.”

“We owe him something,” her father said thoughtfully.  “He got rather rough justice from Paula, anyhow.  I suppose a thing like that could, perhaps, be managed—­if one put his back into it.”

She understood instantly, as before, and quite without exegesis, the twinge of pain that went across his face.  “You will have a back to put into things again, one of these days.  It wants only courage to wait for it, quite patiently until it comes.  You’ve plenty of that.  That’s one of he things Mr. March told me about you,” she added with the playful purpose of surprising him again.  “Only I happened to know that for myself.”

“It’s more than I can be sure of,” he said.  “I’ve been full of bravado with Paula, telling her how soon I was going to be back in harness again; cock-sure and domineering as ever, so that she’d better make hay while the sun shone.  But it was I, nevertheless, who made her go home so that she could start to work—­when the whistle blew.  Some one was going to have to support the family, I told her, and it didn’t look as if it were going to be me.”

This speech, though it ended in jest, had begun, she knew, in earnest.  He meant her to understand that, and left her to judge for herself where the dividing line fell.  She answered in a tone as light as his, “Paula could do it easily enough.”  But she was not satisfied with the way he took it.  The mere quality of the silence must have told her something.  She turned upon him with sudden intensity and said, “Don’t tell me you’re worrying—­about three great healthy people like us.  You have been, though.  Whatever put it into your mind to spend half a thought on that?”