Graham was altogether serious about it.  He had been scouting around during the fortnight since his return and had his eyes on two or three places that might do.  There was one four-hundred-acre property that was altogether desirable, ideal in fact, except for the one painful particular that the cost of it was just about twice as much as Graham’s father was willing to run to.  But if Rush would go in with him they need seek no further.  The thing was as good as settled.

“I did talk to father about it,” Rush now told Mary.  “The thing is a real idea.  Graham and I talked seriously about it while we were smoking before we went up-stairs.  The scheme is to run a dairy, hog and poultry combination on a manufacturing basis and then sell our whole product direct to two or three customers in town, one or two of the clubs—­perhaps a hotel.  Deliver by motor truck every day, you see, and leave the middleman out entirely.  It’s the only way to beat the game.  Father saw it like a shot.  He said it would take a lot of money, of course, but he thought he could manage my share.”

Mary relaxed just perceptibly deeper in the pillows and her eyelids drooped again.  “It’s getting awfully late,” Rush said; “don’t you want to go to sleep?” But he needed no urging to go on when she asked him to tell her all about it, and for another half hour he elaborated the plan.

He was still breezing along on the full tide of the idea, when, happening to glance at her little traveling clock, he pulled himself up short, took away her extra pillows, switched off her night lamp and ordered her to go to sleep at once.  Her apparent docility did not altogether satisfy him and two or three times during the hour before he himself fell asleep, he sat up to look under the door and see whether she had turned the light on again.

He was right about that, of course.  The enforced calm Mary had imposed upon herself as a penance for the tempest of emotion she had indulged—­she had lain without moving, hardly a finger, from the time she remade that bed and crept back into it until hearing Rush coming she switched on the light—­had had a sort of hypnotic effect upon her.  So long as her body did not move, it ceased to exist altogether and set her spirit free, like a pale-winged luna moth from its chrysalis to adventure into the night.  The light it kept fluttering back to was that blinding experience with March while the music of his song had surged through her and her hand had been crushed in his.

Rush’s coming in had brought her back to that tired still body of hers again; his voice soothed, his presence comforted her; at his occasional touch she was able to relax. (If only there were some one who loved her, who would hold her tight—­tight—­) She hoped he would go on talking to her; on and on.  Because while he talked she could manage to stop thinking—­by the squirrel-like process of storing away all the ideas he was suggesting to her for consideration later.