“Oh, my dear, don’t!  Don’t let my vagaries trouble you.  Let me tell you the message I came with.  It’s about the other opera.  They want to put it on at once up at Ravinia.  With Fournier as the officer and that little Spanish soprano as ‘Dolores.’  Just as you wrote it without any of the terrible things you tried to put in for Paula.  It will have to be sung in French of course, because neither of them sings English.  They want you there just as soon as you can come, to sign the contract and help with the rehearsals.”

Once more with an utterly unexpected shift she left him floundering, speechless.

He had forgotten The Outcry except for his nightmare efforts to revamp it for Paula; had charged it off his books altogether.  What Mary had told him at Hickory Hill about her labors in its behalf had signified simply, how rapturously delicious it was that she should have been so concerned for him.  The possibility of a successful outcome to her efforts hadn’t occurred to him.

She said, smiling with an amused tenderness over his confusion, “I haven’t been too officious, have I?”

He knew he was being mocked at and he managed to smile but he had to blink and press his hand to his eyes again before he could see her clearly.

“It’s not astonishing that you can work miracles,” he said.  “The wonder would be if you could not.”

“There was nothing in the least miraculous about this,” she declared.  “It wasn’t done by folding my wings and weaving mystic circles with a wand.  Besides making that translation,—­oh, terribly bad, I’m afraid,—­into French, I’ve cajoled and intrigued industriously for weeks like one of those patient wicked little spiders of Henri Fabre’s.  I found a silly flirtation between Fournier and a married woman I knew and I encouraged it, helped it along and made it useful.  I’ve used everybody I could lay my hands on.”

What an instrument of ineffable delight that voice of hers was,—­its chalumeau tenderness just relieved with the sparkle of irony.  But he was smitten now with the memory of his own refusal to go to Ravinia so that Paula would remember him again.  He blurted out something of his contrition over this but she stopped him.

“It was only because I wanted you there.  I would not for any conceivable advantage in the world have let you—­oh, even touch these devices that I’ve been concerned with.  But I’ve reveled in them myself.  In doing them for you, even though I could not see that they were getting anywhere.

“Everything seemed quite at a standstill when I left Ravinia Thursday, but on Thursday night the Williamsons dined with Mr. Eckstein and went to the park with him; and they all went home with father and Paula afterward, Fournier and LaChaise, too; and everything happened at once.  I got a note from Paula this morning written yesterday, asking where my translation was, but not telling me anything.  And as she wasn’t at home when I telephoned to answer her question I didn’t know until to-night.