This was to some extent inherent in his profession.  He had a reputation that was growing to amount to fame as a specialist in the very wide field of gynecology, obstetrics and abdominal surgery.  The words themselves made Miss Wollaston shudder.

When he replied to her question, whether or not he had had any sleep at all, with an open grin and that triumphant “Not a wink,” she had a prophetic sense of what was going to happen.  She was going to ask him more questions and he was going to tell her something perfectly ghastly.

She felt herself slipping, but she pulled up.  “What’s in Mary’s letter?” she asked.

She knew that this was not quite fair, and the look that it brought to his face—­a twinge of pain like neuralgia—­awakened a sharp compunction in her.  She did not know why—­at least not exactly why—­his relation with his daughter should be a sore spot in his emotional life, but she knew quite well that this was true.  There was on the surface, nothing, or nowhere near enough, to account for it.

He had always been, Miss Wollaston felt, an adorer to the verge of folly of this lovely pale-blonde daughter of his.  He had indulged her outrageously but without any evident bad results.  Upon her mother’s death, in 1912 that was, when Mary was seventeen years old, she had, to the utmost limit that a daughter could compass, taken her mother’s place in the bereaved man’s life.  She had foregone the college course she was prepared for and had taken over very skillfully the management of her father’s household; even, in a surprisingly successful way, too, the motherly guidance of her two-years-younger brother, Rush.  Miss Wollaston’s testimony on these two points was unbiased as it was ungrudging.  She had offered herself for that job and had not then been wanted.

Two years later there had been a quarrel between John and his daughter.  She fell in love, or thought she did—­for indeed, how could a child of nineteen know?—­with a man to whom her father decisively and almost violently objected.  Just how well founded this objection was Miss Wollaston had no means of deciding for herself.  There was nothing flagrantly wrong with the man’s manners, position or prospects; but she attributed to her brother a wisdom altogether beyond her own in matters of that sort and sided with him against the girl without misgiving.  And the fact that the man himself married another girl within a month or two of Mary’s submission to her father’s will, might be taken as a demonstration that he was right.

John had done certainly all he could to make it up with the girl.  He tried to get her to go with him on what was really a junket to Vienna—­there was no better place to play than the Vienna of those days—­though there was also some sort of surgical congress there that spring that served him as an excuse, and Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had only herself to blame for what happened.