With an effort of will Mary settled herself a little more deeply in the seat behind the wheel and lighted a cigarette.  She hated having to wait, having to be found waiting when they came down together.  She wished she could just—­disappear.  It wasn’t possible, of course.

It was not very long before they came down.  “She says I may stay two days,” John told Mary as they squeezed into their seats in the little roadster.  “Then, relentlessly, she’s going to turn me out.”  But his voice was beyond disguise that of a lover who has prospered.

Mary drove them in almost unbroken silence all the way, down the ravine road and up through the woods to the house in the village.  Then she went on with the car to their garage which stood in a yard of a neighbor, two or three doors away.  She rejected with curt good-humor her father’s offer to help her with this job.  It was what she always did by herself, she said, and took a momentary perverse pleasure, which she despised herself for, in the obvious fact that this troubled him.

Back in the cottage living-room, ten minutes later perhaps, she found him alone and heard then, the explanation of his having come.  They had got the Sunday papers out at Hickory Hill as usual in the middle of the morning but had found no reference to the performance of Tosca the night before.  John had spent a good part of the day fretting over the absence of any news as to how Paula’s venture had succeeded and puzzling over the lack of it in the papers.  Then the obvious explanation had struck one of the boys, that the papers that came out to Hickory Hill on Sunday were an early edition.

He had had old Pete drive him straight into town, at that, and there he had found the news-stand edition containing the criticisms.  The unfairness of them had disturbed him greatly.  Orders or no orders, he hadn’t been able to endure the thought of leaving Paula to suffer under the sting of a sneer like that without making at least an effort to comfort her.  He had driven out to Ravinia without any idea that she was to sing again that night; had been told of it at the park where he had stopped for the purpose of picking up some one who could conduct him to her house.  Learning that she was about to sing again, he had exerted all his will power and waited until this second ordeal should be over.

“It was as much one for me as it could have been for her,” he concluded.  “I don’t know what stage fright is, but vicarious stage fright is the devil.  I never was so terrified in my life.  I hope nobody I knew saw me.  I took pains they shouldn’t, for I must have looked like a ghost.”

“There’s nothing the matter with your looks now,” she told him.  “Hickory Hill must be just the place for you.”

“It would be,” he assented, “if it were possible for me to be whole-heartedly there.  By the way, we’ve got a visitor.  Anthony March.”

She felt herself flush at that with clear pleased surprise.  “Oh, that’s as nice as possible,” she said.  “But how in the world did it happen?  How did you find him?  Paula was trying to and couldn’t.”