She had elected to be tragic; preferred the Catskills with a dull old aunt to Vienna with a gay young father.  John went alone, sore from the quarrel and rather adrift.  In Vienna, he met Paula Carresford, an American opera singer, young, extraordinarily beautiful, and of unimpeachable respectability.  They were in Vienna together the first week in August, 1914.  They got out together, sailed on the same ship for America and in the autumn of that year, here in Chicago, in the most decorous manner in the world, John married her.

There was a room in Miss Wollaston’s well ordered mind which she had always guarded as an old-fashioned New England village housewife used to guard the best parlor, no light, no air, no dust, Holland covers on all the furniture.  Rigorously she forbore to speculate upon the attraction which had drawn John and Paula together—­upon what had happened between them—­upon how the thing had looked and felt to either of them.  She covered the whole episode with one blanket observation:  she supposed it was natural in the circumstances.

And there was much to be thankful for.  Paula was well-bred; she was amiable; she was “nice”; nice to an amazing degree, considering.  She had made a genuine social success.  She had given John a new lease on life, turned back the clock for him, oh—­years.

Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had taken it surprisingly well.  At the wedding she had played her difficult part admirably and during the few months she had stayed at home after the wedding, she had not only kept on good terms with Paula but had seemed genuinely to like her.  In the spring of the next year, 1915, she had, indeed, left home and had not been back since except for infrequent visits.  But then there was reason enough—­excuse enough, anyhow—­for that.  The war was enveloping them all.  Rush had left his freshman year at Harvard uncompleted to go to France and drive an ambulance (he enlisted a little later in the French Army).  Mary had gone to New York to work on the Belgian War Relief Fund, and she had been working away at it ever since.

There was then no valid reason—­no reason at all unless she were willing to go rummaging in that dark room of her mind for it—­why John should always wince like that when one reminded him of Mary.  It was a fact, though, that he did, and his sister was too honest-minded to pretend she did not know it.

He answered her question now evenly enough.  “She’s working harder than ever, she says, closing up her office.  She wants some more money, of course.  And she’s heard from Rush.  He’s coming home.  He may be turning up almost any day now.  She hopes to get a wire from him so that she can meet him in New York and have a little visit with him, she says, before he comes on here.”

It was on Miss Wollaston’s tongue to ask crisply, “Why doesn’t she come home herself now that her Fund is shutting up shop?” But that would have been to state in so many words the naked question they tacitly left unasked.  There was another idea in her brother’s mind that she thought she could deal with.  He had betrayed it by the emphasis he put on the fact that it was to Mary and not to himself that Rush had written the news that he was coming home.  Certainly there was nothing in that.