And I’ll hazard one further guess.  It is that her quarrel with John made March’s opera a rather pleasanter thing to dwell on a little.  She had taken it up in defiance of his wish in the first place; her abandonment of it had acquired from its context the color of a self-sacrificial impulse.  She would carry out her contract, she had told John down in Tryon, but she wouldn’t sing “Dolores” for anybody.  Well, now that her love-life with John was irremediably wrecked, there was a sort of melancholy satisfaction in handling, once more, the thing that stood as the innocent symbol of the disaster.

That’s neither here nor there, of course.  Paula was totally unaware of any such constellation about her simple act of deciding to carry down the score herself instead of handing it over to the maid.

The sight of him standing over the piano in her sitting-room cheered her and the look of melancholy she brought down-stairs with her was replaced by a spontaneous unexpected smile.  Just as Mary, out at Hickory Hill, had predicted, she remembered how well she liked him.  She laid the manuscript on the piano in order to give him both hands.

“I can’t tell you how pleased I am about it,” she said.  “I wish you all the luck in the world.”

He brightened responsively at that but looked, she thought, a little surprised, too.

“I am glad you’re pleased about it,” he told her.  “I wasn’t quite sure you’d know.  Of course, they telephoned.”

She stepped back, puzzled.  “But of course I know!” she said.  “Haven’t I been working on it for weeks!  Why, it was right here in this room that they decided on it.  Days ago.  I’ve been trying frantically to find you ever since.”

“Oh,” he said, “you mean The Outcry.  I thought you were congratulating me on my engagement to marry Mary.”

She stared at him in simple blank incredulity.  “To marry Mary!  Mary Wollaston?  You don’t mean that seriously?”

“It’s the only serious fact in the world,” he assured her.

“But John—­Does John know about it?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he said.

She drew a long breath, then pounced upon him with another question.  “Did you tell him about it, or was it Mary who did?”

“It was I,” March said.  “I was the first one to see him after it happened.”

“He hadn’t suspected anything, had he?” she persisted.

She was vaguely aware that he was a little puzzled and perhaps in the same degree amused by her intensity, but she had no interest in half tones of that sort.

When he answered in the sense she expected, “No, I can testify to that.  He was taken completely by surprise when I broke it to him;” she heaved another long breath, turned away, and sat down heavily in the nearest chair.

“Poor old John!” she said.  But she didn’t let that exclamation go uninterpreted.  “I didn’t mean anything—­personal by that,” she went on.  “Only—­only I didn’t think John could make up his mind to let her marry—­anybody.”  Then in a rush—­an aside, to be sure, but one he was welcome to hear if he chose.—­“He wanted her so much all to himself.”