“Oh, a half,” said Paula; “we’d be equal partners.  That’s fair enough, I suppose.  I sat there all through lunch while he was talking, hating him; hating his big blue chin, and his necktie and his great shiny finger-nails and the way he ate, and feeling, of course, perfectly frightfully unhappy.  I told him I’d let him know what I would do sometime before to-morrow noon, and as soon as I could I got rid of him.  And then I came up here and cried and cried.  And that’s something I haven’t done for a long while.  I felt as if he was a big spider that had been running about all over me tying me up in his web.  And as if I was a fly and couldn’t get out.  There is something spidery about him, you know.  The way he goes back and forth and the way he’s so patient and indirect about it all.  It seemed like the end of the world to me before he finished, as if I never was going to see John again.  Oh, I cried my eyes out.  Well, and then about an hour ago I came to.  I realized that I hadn’t signed his horrible contract and that I needn’t.  And that when this beastly season was over,—­and it isn’t going to last much longer, thank goodness,—­I could go home to John and lock up the piano and never look at a score again.  It was like coming out of a nightmare.”

Mary dared not stop to think.  She took the plunge.

“There’s something about father you’ve got to be told.  I promised Wallace Hood weeks ago that I’d tell you.  I guess he and Martin Whitney think you know about it by now.”

“Something I’ve got to be told about John?” Paula echoed incredulously.  “Why, I was talking with him over the telephone not ten minutes before you came in.”

“Oh, I know.  It’s nothing like that,” Mary said.  “But they say he has tuberculosis.  Not desperately, not so that he can’t get well if he takes care of it.  If he lives out-of-doors and doesn’t worry or try to work.  But if he takes up his practise again this fall, they say,—­Doctor Steinmetz says,—­that it will be—­committing suicide.  That’s one thing.  And the other is that he’s practically bankrupt.  Anyhow, that for a year or two, until he can get back into practise, he’ll need help.  That’s why Wallace and Mr. Whitney wanted you told about it.”

There hadn’t been a movement nor a sound from Paula.  Mary, at the end of that speech was breathless and rather frightened.

Finally Paula asked, “Does he know about it?—­his health I mean.”

“He’s been told,” Mary answered, “but he doesn’t believe it.  They nearly always are skeptical, Doctor Steinmetz says.”

“He’s probably right to be.  He’s a better doctor than six of Steinmetz will ever be.”

Another pause; then, once more from Paula, “Did he tell you about the other thing,—­about his money troubles,—­when you were down in North Carolina with him?”

Mary flushed at the hostile ring there was to that.  “He told me a little,” she said, “but not much more, I thought, than he had already told you.”