He found her in bed for the night, reclining against a stack of pillows as if she had been reading, but from the way she blinked at the softened light from the lamp on her night table, it appeared that she had switched it on only when she heard him coming.  She might have been crying though she looked composed enough now;—­symmetrically composed, indeed, a braid over each shoulder, her hands folded, her legs straight down the middle of the bed making a single ridge that terminated in a little peak where her feet stuck up (the way heroines lie, it occurred to Rush, in the last act of grand operas, when they are dead) and this effect was enhanced by the new-laundered whiteness of the sheet, neatly folded back over the blankets and the untumbled pillows.

“You always look so nice and clean,” he told her, and, forbearing to sit on the edge of the bed as a pat of her hand invited him to, pulled up a chair instead.  It was going to be a real talk, not just a casual good-night chat.

“We were wondering what had become of you,” he said.  “Poor Graham was worried.”

“Graham!” But she did not follow that up.  “I decided we’d had temperament enough for one evening,” she explained in a matter-of-fact tone, “so when I saw I was going to explode I came away quietly and did it in here.  By the time it was over I thought I might as well go to bed.”

“It doesn’t look as if you’d exploded very violently,” he observed.

“Oh, I’ve cleared away the ruins,” she said.  “I hate reminders of a mess.”

It was like her exquisiteness to do that and it tightened his throat to think about it.  He’d have liked to make sure what the cause of the explosion had been, but thought he’d better wait a while for that.  All he ventured in the way of sympathetic approbation was to reach out and pat the ridge that extended down the middle of the bed.  “It certainly has been one devil of an evening,” he said.

“I suppose it has,” she agreed, thoughtfully.  Then, noticing that this had rather thrown him off his stride, she went on, “Tell me all that’s been happening since I ran away.  How did Paula act when it was over?”

“I haven’t seen her,” he said.  “She never came down at all.  Of course it must have been—­well, in a way, a devil of an evening for her, too.  Though I can’t believe our being there cramped her style very much in singing those songs.  If it did, I’d hate to think what she would have done if we hadn’t been.  I hope March liked his own stuff.  He was there all the while, you know.  She must have had him tucked away in that little old room of Annie’s that opened off the nursery.  Somewhere anyhow, because long after every one else had gone, he came down-stairs with the Frenchman.  I got one surprise just then all right.  He’s a private soldier, did you know that?  Just a plain doughboy.”

“Overseas?” Mary asked.

“As far as Bordeaux, with the Eighty-sixth.  Saxaphone player with one of the artillery bands.  In a way I’m rather glad of it.  That that’s what he turns out to be, I mean.”