“You do look perfectly—­consternated,” she said with a pretty good laugh.  “Never mind; I shan’t do anything outrageous for a week or two.  Oh, here they come.  Will you ring, dad?  I want some more hot water.”

Rush came into the drawing-room alone, Paula having lingered a moment, probably before the mirror in the hall.  Mere professional instinct for arranging entrances for herself, Mary surmised this to be.  And she may have been right for Paula was not one of those women who are forever making minute readjustments before a glass.  But when she came in, just after Wallace Hood had accomplished his welcome of the returned soldier, it was hard to believe that she was concerned about the effect she produced upon the group about the tea-table.  She didn’t, indeed, altogether join it, gave them a collective nod of greeting with a faint but special smile for her husband on the end of it and then deliberately seated herself with a “No, don’t bother; this is all right,” at the end of the little sofa that stood in the curve of the grand piano, rather in the background.

When Mary asked her how she wanted her tea, she said she didn’t think she’d have any; and certainly no cakes.  No, not even one of Wallace’s candied strawberries.  There was an exchange of glances between her and Rush over this.

“They have been having tea by themselves, those two,” Mary remarked.

“No,” said Rush, “not what you could call tea.”

Paula smiled vaguely but didn’t throw the ball back, did not happen, it appeared, to care to talk about anything.  Presently the chatter among the rest of them renewed itself.

Only it would have amused an invisible spectator to note how those three Wollastons, blonde, dolichocephalic, high-strung, magnetically susceptible, responded, as strips of gold-leaf to the static electricity about a well rubbed amber rod, to the influence that emanated from that silent figure on the sofa.  Rush, in and out of his chair a dozen times, to flip the ash from his cigarette, to light one for Mary, to hand the strawberries round again, was tugging at his moorings like a captive balloon.  When he answered a question it was with the air of interrupting an inaudible tune he was whistling.  John still planted before the fireplace, taking, automatically, a small part in the talk just as he went through the minimum of business with his tea, seemed capable of only one significant action, which he repeated at short, irregular intervals.  He turned his head enough to enable him to see into a mirror which gave him a reflection of his wife’s face; then turned away again, like one waiting for some sort of reassurance and not getting it.  Mary, muscularly relaxed, indeed, drooping over the tea-table, had visible about her, nevertheless, a sort of supernormal alertness.  Every time her father looked into the mirror she glanced at him, and she rippled, like still water, at all of her brother’s sudden movements.