She propped herself back against her hands with a sigh of fatigue.  “There’s some of the hair-splitting Paula talks about,” she observed.

“It may be fine spun,” her father said thoughtfully, “but it seems to me to hold together.  Isn’t there any more of it?”

“Well, it was balanced like that, you see,” Mary went on; “set for the climax, like the springs in a French play, when I came along at just the moment and with just the word, to topple it over.  Being Paula, she couldn’t help doing exactly what she did.  So, however it comes out, I shall be the one person she won’t be able to forgive.”

She knew from the startled look he turned upon her that this last shot had come uncannily close.  She fancied she must almost literally have echoed Paula’s words.  If she needed any further confirmation she would have found it in the rather panicky way in which he set about trying to convince her that she was mistaken, if not in the fact at least in the permanence of it.

She insisted no further, made indeed no further attempt at all to carry the theme along and though she listened and made appropriate replies when they were called for, she let her wordless thought drift away to a dream that it was Anthony March who shared this shade and sunshine with her and that veiled blue horizon yonder.  It was easier to do since her father had drifted into a reverie of his own.  They need not have lingered for they had sufficiently talked away all possible grounds of misunderstanding, even if they had not reconciled their disagreement.

It occurred to her to suggest that they go back, but she dismissed the impulse with no more than a glancing thought.  It was his burden, not hers, that remained to be shouldered at the cottage and it might be left to him to choose his own time for taking it up.  Paula seldom came down much before noon anyhow.

As for John Wollaston, he was very tired.  Paula’s volcanic moments always exhausted him.  He never could derationalize his emotions, cut himself free; and while he felt just as intensely as she did, he had to carry the whole superstructure of himself along on those tempestuous voyages.  In the mood Paula had left him in this morning, there was nothing in the world that could have satisfied and restored him as did his daughter’s companionship.  The peace of this wordless prolongation of their talk together was something he lacked, for a long while, the will to break.

It was not far short of noon when they came back into the veranda together.  He had walked the last hundred yards, after a look at his watch, pretty fast and after a glance into both the down-stairs rooms, he called up-stairs to his wife in a voice that had an edge of sudden anxiety in it.  Then getting no response, he went up, two at a time.

Mary dropped down, limp with a sudden premonition, upon the gloucester swing in the veranda.  The maid of all work, who had heard his call, came from the kitchen just as he was returning down the stairs.  Mrs. Wollaston had gone away, she said.  Pete had reported with the big car at eleven o’clock and Paula, who apparently had been waiting for him, had driven off at once having left word that she would not be back for lunch.