He said, not quite knowing whether to be pleased or not, that they could ask her about it at all events.  They were rather counting on her out at Hickory Hill but he didn’t know that that need matter.  Only wasn’t Mary—­family, herself, a reminder of home?

“Not a bit,” said Paula, with a laugh.  “Not but what she likes me well enough,” she went on, trying to account for her preference (these Wollastons were always concerned about the whys of things) “but she stands off a little and looks on; without holding her breath, either.  And then, well, she’d be a sort of reminder of you, after all.”

Put that way, he couldn’t quarrel with it, though there was a challenge about it that chilled him a little.  Watched over by his own daughter (this was what it came to) Paula would be beyond suspicion—­even of Lucile.

Mary, when the scheme was put up to her was no less surprised than John had been, but she was pleased clear through, and with a clean-cutting executive skill he had hardly credited her with, she thought out the details of the plan and revised the rest of their summer arrangements to fit.

The Dearborn Avenue house should be closed and her father should move out to the farm.  The apple house was now remodeled to a point where it would accommodate him as well as Aunt Lucile very comfortably.  The boys and the servants could live around in tents and things.  She’d want only one maid for the cottage at Ravina and the small car which she’d drive herself.

The sum of all the activities that Mary proposed for herself added up to a really exacting job; housekeeper, personal maid, chauffeur, chaperon and secretary.  It was with a rather mixed lot of emotions that John thought of delivering her over to be tied to Paula’s chariot wheels like that.  One of the two women who loved him serving the other in a capacity so nearly menial!  The thought of it gave him an odd sort of thrill even while he shrank from it.  Certainly, he would not have assented to it, had it not been so unmistakably what Mary herself wanted.  Her reasons for wanting it he couldn’t feel that he had quite fathomed.

There was, as a matter of fact, nothing fine-spun about them.  It was a job in the first place and gave her, therefore, she mordantly told herself, an excuse for continuing to exist.  It was an escape from Hickory Hill. (Clear cowardice this was, she confessed.  That situation would have to be met and settled one way or the other before long; but her dread of both the possible alternatives had mounted since her frustrated attempt to confide in her father.) The third reason which she avowed to everybody, was simple excited curiosity for a look into a new world.  The mystery and the glamour of it attracted her.  Paula’s proposal gave her the opportunity to see what these strange persons were like when they were not strutting their little while upon the stage.