“Oh, I’ll wait for the others,” he said.  “They can’t be much later than this.—­I’m glad she’s taken a vacation from those songs,” he went on presently from the fireplace.  “She told me last night she’d been working all day with Novelli over them.  Only sent him home about half an hour before it was time for her to dress for dinner.  Do you suppose,”—­this to Wallace—­“that they’re as wonderful as she thinks they are?”

It was obvious to Mary that Hood’s reply was calculated to soothe; his attitude was indulgent.  He talked to Mary about March as just another of Paula’s delightful extravagances.  March’s indignant refusal, at first, to tune the Circassian grand, his trick of sitting on the floor under Paula’s piano while she played for him, his forgetting to be paid, though he had not, in all probability, a cent in his pockets, were exhibited as whimsicalities, such as Wallace’s favorite author, J.M.  Barrie, might have invented.  It was just like Paula to take him up as she had done, to work away for days at his songs, proclaiming the wonder of them all the while.  “We’re all hoping, of course,” he concluded, “that when she’s finished with them to-night, she’ll sing us some of the old familiar music we really love.”

The neat finality of all this, produced, momentarily, the effect of ranging Mary on the other side, with Paula and her musician.  But just at this point, she lost her character of disinterested spectator, for Wallace, having put March back in his box and laid him deliberately on the shelf, abruptly produced, by way of diversion, another piece of goods altogether.

“I hope Mary’s come home to stay,” he said to John.  “We can’t let her go away again, can we?”

Afterward, she was able to see that it was a natural enough thing for him to have said.  It would never have occurred to him, pleasant, harmless sentimentalist that he was, that John’s second marriage might be a disturbing factor in his relation with Mary and that the question so cheerfully asked as an escape from the more serious matter that he had been talking about, struck straight into a ganglion of nerves.

But at the time, no such excuse for him presented itself.  She stared for a moment, breathless, paled a little and locked her teeth so that they shouldn’t chatter; then, a wave of bright anger relaxed her stiffened muscles.  She did not look at her father but was aware that he was fixedly not looking at her.

“I don’t know whether I am going to stay or not,” she said casually enough.  “There isn’t any particular reason why I should, unless I can find something to do.  You haven’t a job for me, have you?”

“A job?” Wallace gasped.

“In your office,” she explained.  “Filing and typing, or running the mimeograph.  It seems to be a choice between something like that and—­millinery.”

“That’s an extravagant idea,” her father said, trying for, but not quite able to manage, a tone that matched hers.  “Good lord, Wallace, don’t sit there looking as if you thought she meant it!”