“Well, it’ll be no picnic for her,” Rush exploded angrily.  “I’ll see her at five-thirty myself.  She must be plumb out of her head if she thinks she’ll be allowed to do a thing like that.”

Once more, before Wallace could speak, it was Graham who intervened.  “I want you to leave this to me,” he said gravely.  “I don’t know whether I can settle it or not, but I’d like to try.”  He turned to Wallace.  “Would you mind, sir, letting me go to tea with her at half past five in your place?”

It is possible that, but for Wallace’s day-dream of himself offering Mary the shelter and the care she so obviously needed, he might have persisted in seeing her first and assuring her that he was to be regarded as an ally whatever she decided to do.  Her voice as she had said, “I know I can never marry Graham” echoed forlornly in his mind’s ear.  But a doubt faint and vague as it was, of his own disinterestedness held him back.  Graham was young; he was in love with her.  That gave him right of way, didn’t it?

So he assented.  It was agreed that Rush should dine with Wallace at his apartment.  Graham, if he had any news for them should communicate it by telephone.  Instantly!

CHAPTER XXII

THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

The instinct to conceal certain moods of depression and distress together with the histrionic power to make the concealment possible may be a serious peril to a woman of Mary Wollaston’s temperament.  She had managed at the telephone that morning to deceive Wallace pretty completely.  Even her laugh had failed to give her away.

She was altogether too near for safety to the point of exhaustion.  She had endured her second night without sleep.  She had not really eaten an adequate meal since her lunch in town the day Paula had engineered her out of the way for that talk with Maxfield Ware.

There was nothing morbid in her resolution to find, at the earliest possible moment, some way of making herself independent of her father’s support.  Having pointed out Paula’s duty as a bread winner she could not neglect her own, however dreary the method might be, or humble the results.  In any mood, of course, the setting out in search of employment would have been painful and little short of terrifying to one brought up the way Mary had been.

A night’s sleep though and a proper breakfast would have kept the thing from being a nightmare.  As it was, she felt, setting out with her clipping from the help-wanted columns of a morning paper, a good deal like the sole survivor of some shipwreck, washed up upon an unknown coast, venturing inland to discover whether the inhabitants were cannibals.  Even the constellations in her sky were strange.