It was not until late that night that his misgivings as to the part Mary might have played in this drama really awoke, but when they did he marveled that they had not occurred to him earlier.  He recalled that Mary had prophesied during their talk at the Saddle and Cycle that Paula would attribute to her the suggestion—­whoever might make it—­that an operatic career for John’s wife was desirable and necessary for financial reasons.  She had said too, in that serious measured way of hers, “If Paula ever saw me coming between her and father, whether it was my doing or not, she would hate me with her whole heart.”

Had that prediction been justified?  There were half a dozen phrases that Paula had allowed herself to use this afternoon, which added up to a reasonable certainty that it was altogether justified.  It was not easy for him to admit to himself that he didn’t like Paula; that he knew her and had long known her for a person incapable of following any lead save that of her own primitive straightforward desires.

His self-communings reached down deeper into him than they had done for many a long year.  He convicted himself, before his vigil was over, of flagrant cowardice in having allowed Mary to undertake the burden of that revelation.  What harm would it have done any one, even himself, beyond an hour’s discomfort, to have drawn down Paula’s lightnings on his own head?  Her enmity, even though it were permanent, could not seriously have changed the tenor of his ways.

But to Mary, such a thing could easily be a first-class disaster.  Could John be relied upon to come whole-heartedly to her defense.  No, he could not.  Indeed—­this was the thought that made Wallace gasp as from a dash of cold water in the face—­John’s anger at this interference with his affairs and at the innocent agent of it was likely to be as hot as his wife’s.  Momentarily anyhow.  What a perfectly horrible situation to have forced the girl into;—­that fragile sensitive young thing!

And now above all other times, when, for some reason not fully known to him, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing to manage.  He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how she had flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tense emotion if he couldn’t find her a job.  It had been that very night, hadn’t it?—­when Paula had given that recital of Anthony March’s songs—­that she had disappeared out of the midst of things and never come back during the whole evening.  When one considered her courage a flight like that told a good deal.

Then there had been that something a little short of an engagement with Graham Stannard, which must have distressed her horribly;—­any one with a spirit as candid as hers and with as honest a hatred of all that was equivocal.  The family had seemed to think that it would all come out right in the end somehow, yet the last time she had talked with him she had said, cutting straight through the disguise his thought had hidden itself behind, “I know I can’t ever marry Graham.”