“Why, it was a letter from Martin Whitney,” he said.  “Oh, the best meant thing in the world.  Nothing but encouragement in it from beginning to end, only it was so infernally encouraging, it set me off.  No, let me talk.  You’re quite the easiest person in the world to tell things to.  I’ve been remiss, there’s no getting away from that.  I’ve never taken money-making very seriously, it came so easily.  I’ve spent my earnings the way my friends have spent their incomes.  Well, if I’d died the other day, there wouldn’t have been much left.  There would have been my life insurance for Paula, and enough to pay my debts, including my engagements for Rush, but beyond that, oh, a pittance merely.  Of course with ten years’ health, back at my practise, even with five, I could improve the situation a lot.”

She urged as emphatically as she dared—­she wanted to avoid the mistake of sounding encouraging—­that the situation needed no improvement.  The income of fifty thousand dollars would take care of Paula, and beyond that,—­well, if there were ever two healthy young animals in the world concerning whom cares and worries were superfluous, they were herself and Rush.

He told her thoughtfully that this was where she was; wrong.  “Rush, to begin with, isn’t a healthy young animal.  That’s what I couldn’t make Martin Whitney understand.  He’s one of the war’s sacrifices precisely as much as if he had had his leg shot off.  He needs support; will go on needing it for two or three years, financial as well as moral.  He mustn’t be allowed to fail.  That’s the essence of it.  He’s—­spent, you see; depleted.  One speaks of it in figurative terms, but it’s a physiological thing—­if we could get at it—­that’s behind the lassitude of these boys.  It all comes back to that.  That they’re restless, irresolute.  That they need the stimulus of excitement and can’t endure the drag of routine.  They need a generous allowance, my dear,—­even for an occasional failure in self-command, those two boys out at Hickory Hill.”

She had nothing to say to that, though his pause gave her opportunity.  A sudden surmise as to the drift of that last sentence, silenced her.  And it was a surmise that leaped, in the next instant, to full conviction.  He was pleading Graham’s cause with her!  Why?  Was it something that had been as near his heart as that, all along?  Or had some one—­Rush—­or even Graham himself—­engaged his advocacy?

She said at last, rather breathlessly (it was necessary to say something or he would perceive that his stratagem had betrayed itself):  “Well, at the gloomy worst, Rush is taken care of.  And as for me, I’m not a war sacrifice, anyhow.  That’s not a possible conception—­even for a worried convalescent.  Did you ever see anything as gorgeous as that tree, even in an Urban stage setting?”

“No,” he said, “the war wasn’t what you were sacrificed to.”

She held her breath until she saw he wasn’t going on with that.  But he seemed willing to follow her lead to lighter matters, and for the rest of their excursion they carried out the pretense that there was nothing like a cloud in their sky.