“I can see Paula when you told her that,” Mary reflected.  “Or did you make dad tell her himself?  Yes, of course you did!  Only what I can’t understand is why Paula didn’t say, ’All right.  Have your party, and I’ll sing if you want me to.  Only not—­what’s his name?—­March’s songs.’  And have him all to herself, as she wanted him, later.  That would have been mate in one move, I should think.”

Then, at the fleeting look she caught in the act of vanishing from her aunt’s face, she cried, “You mean she did say that?  And that father turned to ice, the way he can and—­made a point of it?  You know it’s serious, if he’s done that.”

With a vigor meant to compensate for a sad lack of conviction, Miss Wollaston protested against this chain of unwarranted assumptions.  But she admitted, at last, that her own surmise accorded with that of her niece.  John certainly had said to her at breakfast that he saw no reason for foregoing the musical feature of the evening simply because an audience was to be present to hear it.  Paula’s only comment had been a dispassionate prediction that it wouldn’t work.  It wouldn’t be fair to say she sulked; her rather elaborate detachment had been too good-humored for that.  Her statement, at lunch, that she was to be turned on like a Victrola at half past nine, was a fair sample.

“What’s he like, this genius of hers?” Mary wanted to know.  “Young and downy and helpless, I suppose.  With a look as if he was just about to burst into tears.  I met one like that last winter.”  She knew exactly how to get results out of her aunt.

“He’s not in the least like that!  If he had been I should never have brought him home, not even to tune the piano.  He’s quite a well behaved, sensible-appearing young man, a little over thirty, I should say.  And he does speak nicely, though I think Paula exaggerates about that.”

“Sensible or not, he’s fallen wildly in love with her, of course,” Mary observed.  “The more so they are the more instantaneously they do it.”

But this lead was one Miss Wollaston absolutely declined to follow.  “If that clock’s right,” she exclaimed, gazing at a little traveling affair Mary had brought home with her, “I haven’t another minute.”  It was not right, for it was still keeping New York time, but the diversion served.  “Wallace Hood spoke of coming in to see you about tea-time,” she said from the doorway.  “I’m going to be to busy even to stop for a cup, so do be down if you can.”

CHAPTER V

JOHN MAKES A POINT OF IT