Whether he heard it or not, he failed, she thought, to attach any special significance to that last comment of hers.  He said that John had been very nice about it, though he was, as any father would be under the circumstances, taken aback.  He had consented to regard the arrangement as an accomplished fact and would, March hoped, in time be fully reconciled to it.  Then he went back rather quickly to the matter of his opera.

“Of course, it means more than ever to me now,” he said, putting his hand on the manuscript, “to get this produced.  If it goes moderately well it will help in a good many ways.”

She found some difficulty in again turning her mind to this theme and answered absently and rather at random, until she perceived that he was getting ready to take his leave.  He was saying something about an appointment with LaChaise.

“Is it at once?” she asked.  “Do you have to go right away?”

“I’m to have dinner with him and his secretary, who can talk English, at six,” March said, “but I thought I’d carry this off somewhere and read it before I talked with them.  It’s been a long way out of my mind this last three months.”

“Don’t go,” Paula said.  “It seems so—­so nice to have you here.  Sit down and read your score.  Then you’ll have a piano handy in case you want to hear anything.”  She added as she saw him hesitate, “I won’t bother you—­but I’m feeling awfully lonely to-day.”

At that, of course, he relinquished, though a little dubiously she thought, his intention to go.  She set about energetically making matters convenient for him, cleared a small table of its litter and set it in the window where he would have the best light; chose a chair for him to sit in; urged him to take off his coat; and began looking about for something for him to smoke—­but not quite successfully.  She was sure there were cigarettes of Mary’s somewhere about.

He didn’t care to smoke just now, he said.  If he felt later like resorting to a pipe he would.

Was there anything else?  Didn’t he want a pencil and paper to make notes on?  No, he was supplied with everything, he said.

But for all the ardor of these preparations of hers, she was a little disconcerted and aggrieved at the way he took her at her word and plunged into the study of his score.

She found herself a novel and managed, for five minutes or so, to pretend to read.  Then she flung it aside and drifted over to the piano bench and after gazing moodily a while at the keyboard, began in a fragmentary way to play bits of nothing that came into her head.  But she stopped herself short in manifest contrition when, happening to look around at him, she saw a knot of baffled concentration in his forehead.

“Of course, you can’t read if I do that,” she said.  “I’m sorry.”  Then under cover of the same interruption, “How did John look when you saw him this morning?  Like a wreck?  What time was it, anyway?  It must have been frightfully early that he left here because I waked as soon as it was really light and he was gone by then.”