“Well,” he said, with a grin, “if you really want—­desperately—­to go to him, of course there’s the trolley.”

She stared at him for a moment and then perceiving, or thinking she perceived, something allegorical about the suggestion, she gave a laugh, swooped down and kissed him and went.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE KALEIDOSCOPE

It was the next Sunday morning that Miss Wollaston, who had decided to stay in town even though the emergency she had been summoned to meet was found mysteriously to have evanesced when she arrived, asked Wallace Hood, walking home with her from church, to come in to lunch.

“I haven’t the least idea,” she said, “whether we shall be quite by ourselves or whether the entire family, including the latest addition to it, will come straggling in before we’ve finished.”

She would not have considered it quite delicate to have owned to him how very clearly she hoped to have him, for an hour or two, all to herself.  He would be found, she was confident, not to have gone through the looking-glass into the world of topsy-turvey that all the rest of them seemed to be inhabiting, these days.  It would be comforting to talk with somebody who was still capable of regarding things right side to.

She was much too penetrating a person not to have been perfectly aware from the first that, astonishing as were the facts John had communicated to her, upon her arrival from Hickory Hill a week ago, other facts of major importance were being suppressed.

She had found her brother apparently occupied in the normal Sunday morning manner with his newspaper, and he had answered her rather breathless inquiries about Mary by saying that she was all right.  She was finishing off her night’s sleep but would, he supposed, be down by and by.  There was nothing the matter.  Rush had been unnecessarily alarmed, lacking the fact which explained the case.  And then he sprang his mine, informing her that Mary was engaged to marry Anthony March.

When, after a speechless interval, she had asked him, feebly, whether he didn’t mean Graham Stannard, he had been very short with her indeed.  The engagement to March was an accomplished fact, and the sooner we took it for granted the better.  He showed a great reluctance to go further into detail about the matter and he flinched impatiently from the innocent question;—­when had he himself been informed of this astounding state of things.  Well, naturally, since in the train of his answer the fact had been elicited that he hadn’t come to town until this morning and that Mary had spent another night alone.  And it was not Mary but March who had, already this morning, told him about it.

Beyond that John couldn’t be driven to go.  He concluded by putting a categorical injunction upon her.  She wasn’t to expostulate with Mary nor to attempt to examine either into her reasons for this step nor into her state of mind in making it.  He was satisfied that the girl knew what she was doing and that it represented her real wishes.  His sister’s satisfaction on these points would have to be vicarious.