“Not just for this minute,” she said contentedly.  “I don’t know whether I’m going to Chicago with you, tomorrow, or not.”

“That’s all right,” he said.  “I know all about that.”  He added, “I hope the other girl won’t mind—­the one who lives here with you.  What was her name?”

“Ethel Holland?  Oh, she went over to France with the Y.M.C.A. just about a year ago.  I’ve tried to find somebody to take her place, but there didn’t seem to be any one I liked well enough.  So I’ve been living alone.”

She saw his face stiffen at that but his only comment was that that simplified matters.

CHAPTER IV

THE PICTURE PUZZLE

There was a good quarter of an hour beginning with the tear-blurred moment when Mary caught sight of her father looking for her and Rush down the railway station platform, during which the whole fabric of misgivings about her home-coming dissolved as dreams do when one wakes.  It had not been a dream she knew, nor the mere concoction of her morbid fancy.  He had not looked at her like this nor kissed her like this—­not once since that fatal journey to Vienna five years ago.  Had something happened between him and Paula that made the difference?  Or was it her brother’s presence, that, serving somehow to take off the edge, worked a mysterious catalysis?

When John, after standing off and gazing wordless for a moment at this new son of his, this man he had never seen, in his captain’s uniform with bits of ribbon on the breast of it,—­tried to say how proud he was and choked instead, it was for Mary that he reached out an unconscious, embracing arm, the emotion which would not go into words finding an outlet for itself that way.

When they got out to the motor and old Pete, once coachman, now chauffeur, his eyes gleaming over the way Rush had all but hugged him, said to her, “You home to stay, too, Miss Mary?” her father’s hand which clasped her arm revealed the thrilling interest with which he awaited her answer to that question.  The importunity of the red-cap with the luggage relieved her of the necessity for answering but the answer in her heart just then was “Yes.”

It was with a wry self-scornful smile that she recalled, later that day, the emotions of the ride home.  If at any time before they got to the house, her father had repeated the old servant’s question, “Are you home to stay, Mary?” she would, she knew, have kissed the hand that she held clasped in hers, wept blissfully over it and told him she wanted never to go away again.  She hadn’t minded his not asking because she thought she knew quite surely why he had not.  He was afraid to risk his momentary happiness upon her answer.  And why had she not volunteered the assurance he wanted so eagerly and dared not ask for?  The beastly answer to that question was that she had enjoyed the thrill of his uncertainty—­a miserable sort of feline coquetry.