Mary replied to this question a little absently.  “Father insisted that she carry out the Ravinia contract.  She told me so herself and seemed, I don’t know why, just a little resentful about it.  But I’m sure she can’t have any idea that there was a need for money at the back of it.  It has irritated her rather whenever she has caught me economizing up there.  And father will never tell her any more pointedly than he has, you can be sure.  Some one of us will have to do it.”

“You’re on very good terms with her, aren’t you?” Wallace asked.  He added instantly, though with an effort, “I’m willing to tell her if you wish me to.”

She smiled very faintly at that for she knew how terrifying such a prospect would be to him.  “Whoever told Paula,” she said, “she’d eventually attribute it, I think, back to me.  So I may as well, and rather better, do it directly.”

The tension slackened between them for a while after that.  The talk became casual.  Wallace, it was easy to see, was enormously relieved.  Mary had been put in unreserved possession of the facts and had endured them better than he could possibly have hoped.  He began chatting about the farm again, not now as an incubus but as a hopeful possibility.  Both the boys had real mettle in them and might be expected to buckle down and show it.  Rush would forget the disillusionment of his holiday hopes when the necessities of the case were really brought home to him.  And as for Graham ...

Wallace broke off short there, flushed, and made a rather panicky effort to retrieve the slip.  He was in the family enough to be a part of the Graham conspiracy.  Poor Graham, distracted by her innocent inability to make up her mind to marry him!  He would be all right as soon as her maidenly hesitations should have come to an end, and she’d made him the happiest man in the world with the almost inevitable yes.

She had gone rather white by the end of a long silence.  Finally: 

“Wallace,” she began in a tone so tense that he waited breathlessly for her to go on, “do you remember I asked you once, the day I came home from New York, if you couldn’t find me a job?  I know you didn’t think I meant it and I did not altogether—­then.  But I mean it now.  I need it—­desperately.—­Wallace, I can’t ever marry Graham.  I know I can’t.  And I can’t go on being dependent on father while he’s dependent on Paula.”

He caught at a straw.  “Paula is really very fond of you,” he said.

“Yes, in a way,” Mary agreed; “though she sometimes has regarded me a little dubiously.  But if she ever saw me—­coming between her and father, or father turning ever so little away from her—­toward me, whether it was any of my doing or not, she’d—­hate me with her whole heart.  It may not be very logical but it’s true.”