“Was she?” Her father’s voice, she thought, flattened a little on the question.  “Why, he found us.  He turned up on foot—­Friday morning, it must have been—­with a knapsack on his shoulders; came to the farm-house door and asked if he should tune the piano.  Luckily, I happened to be about and caught him before he could get away.  He was combining a walking trip, he said, with his own way of earning a living and I persuaded him to stay for a few days and make us a visit.”

The last part of that sentence, Paula, coming down into the room from up-stairs, heard.

“Who?” she asked.  “Who’s the visitor you’ve been persuading?”

It was just a good-natured way of showing her interest in anything that her husband might happen to be talking about.  But when he answered, “Anthony March,” she came into focus directly.

“Thank goodness, you’ve found him!” she said.  “I had about given him up.—­And I really need him.”

“I thought,” said John, “that you had given him up.  Are you going to do his opera, after all?”

“Opera!” said Paula blankly, as if she had never heard of such a thing.  “No, I want him to see if he can fix this beastly piano they’ve given me so that it’s fit to work with.”

And John, after a moment-laughed.

It was a shattering sort of laugh to Mary.  She stared at the man who uttered it as if he were—­what he had for the moment become—­a stranger.  He was not, certainly, the man who, down in North Carolina had talked about March with her, regretted the “rough justice” he had had from Paula and considered the possibility of repairing it.  That momentary blank look of his had shown that he perceived the insensitive egotism of his wife’s attitude.  Not even now that her success was an established thing had she a regretful thought for the man who had hoped to share it with her.  She had forgotten those hopes.  All she remembered now about Anthony March was that he could tune pianos better than any one else.

This Mary’s father saw and yet he laughed.  A cruel laugh.  He had felt for the moment a recurrence of the old jealousy.  In his relief from it, he, a reassured lover, triumphed in the humiliation of one he had supposed his rival.

Mary managed to hide her face from him—­superfluously because he wasn’t looking at her—­and thought up, desperately, a few more questions about how they were getting on at Hickory Hill.

But she went on feeling from moment to moment more horribly in the way, and at last with a simulated yawn she said she was going to bed.  “This—­vicarious success is rather tiring,” she told her father; “almost as bad as vicarious stage fright.”  And then to Paula, “Is there any reason, if you’re going to keep father here for two days, why I shouldn’t steal a holiday?”

“Go away, do you mean?” Paula asked with a faint flush.  “Why,—­where would you go?”

“I could drive over to Hickory Hill,” Mary said, “either by myself in the little car or with Pete in the big one.  Whichever you wouldn’t rather have here.”