March reflected, with a shudder, what a ghastly procession of hours those must have been.  Had it been then, he wondered, that, looking for some harmless thing to help her sleep, she had come upon the deadlier stuff?

Her encounter with her brother at breakfast, which she had prepared, was their first, it seemed, since her visit to Hickory Hill and Rush had been shocked at her wan, lifeless appearance.  He’d guessed, of course, that his friend’s suit hadn’t prospered and now took the line, which no doubt seemed to him the most tactful and comforting one available, that she was too ill to attempt any final decision on such a subject just now and that things would look different when better health had driven morbid thoughts away.

Her vehemence in trying to convince him that she had acted finally in the matter, that Graham now acquiesced fully in her decision and no longer wanted to marry her, and that Rush must let him alone—­not even try to talk with him about it—­had only made him the more confident in his diagnosis.

It must have been pat in the middle of this scene that Graham’s midnight-written letter arrived.  Rush’s attitude toward his partner’s flight—­after the first moments of mere incredulity—­had been one of contemptuous irritation, the natural attitude for any young man who sees a comrade taking no more of a matter than a disappointment in love with an evident lack of fortitude.  This was heightened, too, by a rapidly developed sense of personal grievance.  What the devil did Graham think was going to happen to him with Hickory Hill left on his hands like that?  There was more than enough work for the two of them.  And then the financial aspect of it!  Mr. Stannard, who had just been brought to the point of loosening up and letting them have a little more money, would of course leave Rush to his fate.  If he didn’t call his loans and sell him out!  Ruin them altogether!  Graham must simply be found and dragged back before his father learned of his flight.

He couldn’t have been paying his sister much attention while he ran on like that!  Unwisely, perhaps, but inevitably, Mary attempted to defend the fugitive—­in the only way she thought of as possible; namely, by showing her brother what the true situation was.

She didn’t try to tell March what she said.  The thing which, with a forlorn smile, she dwelt upon, was the terrified vehemence with which Rush had stopped her at his first inkling of what she was trying to make him see.  She was simply out of her head.  A bad case, he pronounced, of neurasthenia.  Her having set out yesterday to find a job should have made that plain enough.  What she needed was a nurse and a doctor—­and he meant to provide both within the next few hours.  He then compromised by saying that the nurse he had in mind was for the moment Aunt Lucile and the doctor their father.

With an alternation of truculence and cajolery, he had got her to lie down and to promise not to talk—­that was the important thing—­and this accomplished he devoted half an hour to the composition of a note to Miss Wollaston (whom it was difficult to tell anything to over the telephone, particularly with long distance rural connections) which he despatched, in charge of Pete, in the big car.  Pete would get back with her by three at the latest.