“Thank God!” said Rush.

Graham dropped into a chair with a gesture of relief even more expressive.

Rush explained the cause of their alarm.  Old Pete had driven in to Hickory Hill around two o’clock with a letter, addressed to Mary, from Paula, and on being asked to explain offered the disquieting information that she had left Ravinia for the farm, the afternoon before.  They had driven straight to town and to Wallace as the likeliest source of information.

In the emotional back-lash from his profound disquiet about his sister, suddenly reassured that there was nothing—­well, tragic to be apprehended, Rush allowed himself an outburst of brotherly indignation.  He’d like to know what the devil Mary meant by giving them a fright like that.  Why hadn’t she telephoned last night?  Nothing was easier than that.  Or more to the point still, why hadn’t she come straight out to the farm as she had told her father she meant to do, instead of spending the night in town?

Wallace would have let him go on, since it gave him a little time he wanted for deciding what line to take.  But Graham, it seemed, couldn’t stand it.

“Shut up, Rush!” he commanded. (You are to remember that he was three years his partner’s senior.) “Mary never did an—­inconsiderate thing in her life.  If she seems to have forgotten about us, you can be dead sure there’s a reason.”

“I agree with Stannard,” Wallace put in, “that she wants to be dealt with—­gently.  She must have been having a rather rotten time.”

He hadn’t yet made up his mind how far to take them into his confidence as to what he knew and guessed, but Rush made an end of his hesitation.

“Tell us, for heaven’s sake, what it’s all about.—­Oh, you needn’t mind Graham.  He’s as much in it as any of us.  I suppose you know how he stands.”

Wallace was conscious of an acute wish that they had not turned up until he’d had a chance to see Mary, but somehow he felt he couldn’t go behind an assurance like that.  So he told them what he had pieced together.

Rush grunted and blushed and said he’d be damned, but it was not a theme—­this contention between his father and his stepmother—­that he could dwell upon.  He got hold at last of something that he could be articulate about, and demanded to know why, in these circumstances, Mary hadn’t come straight to them at Hickory Hill instead of camping out, for the night, all by herself in the Dearborn Avenue house.

“She has an idea she must find a job for herself,” Wallace said, feeling awkwardly guilty as if he had betrayed her; but the way Rush leaped upon him, demanding in one breath what the deuce he meant and what sort of job he was talking about, made it impossible to pull up.

He recounted the request Mary had made of him, concerning his sister in Omaha, and, last of all, stated his own misgiving—­nothing but the merest guess of course—­that she had been putting in this day answering advertisements.  “She said she’d give me a picnic tea at five-thirty and tell me what she’d been doing.”