He brightened at the sight of her but she thought he didn’t look very hopeful.  He said though, that he believed her father was going to get well.  “Medically, he hasn’t more than an even chance.  He hasn’t much fight in him somehow.  But that stepmother of yours means to pull him through.  She doesn’t mean to be beaten and I don’t believe she will be.  I’ve never seen the equal of her.  It shows they’re born, not made.  She’s never had, your aunt assures me, any nursing experience whatever.”

Mary thought she detected a twinkle in Darby’s eye over this mention of Aunt Lucile, but it was gone before she could make sure.

“You’re to go up and see him for five minutes,” he went on.  “Paula’s keeping a look-out for you.  He mustn’t be allowed to talk, of course, but she wants him to know you’re back.  She has an idea, and she’s probably right, that he is worrying about you.”

“What is there that I can do?” she asked.  “To help, I mean.”

“Hope,” he told her bluntly.  “Pray if you can.  Cheer up your aunt a bit, if possible; she’s in despair.  Only don’t try to take away any of her occupations.  That’s about all.”

“In other words, nothing,” she commented.

“Well, none of us can do much more than that,” he said, “excepting always, Paula.”

It was not until she had spent that heart-tearing five minutes at her father’s bedside, while she talked cheerful little encouraging futilities in a voice dry with the effort she had to make to keep it from breaking, that she saw her aunt—­and felt grateful for Doctor Darby’s warning.  Mary had never thought of Lucile before as an old woman, but she seemed more than that now,—­broken and, literally, in despair—­of her brother’s life.  And beyond this there was a bitterness which Mary could not, at first, account for.

“Paula, I hear, has allowed you to see him.  For five minutes!  Well, that is more than she has allowed me.  Or any of us.  It was a chance for showing off, I suppose, that was more than she could resist.”

“I was a little afraid it might be that,” Mary admitted.  “Afraid of finding her—­carefully costumed for the part, you know.  But she wasn’t.  She didn’t come into the room with me at all; just told me not to show I was shocked by the way he looked and not to let him talk.  And she seemed glad I was back; not for me but because it might help him.  It seems a miracle that he’s still alive, after almost a week of that, and I guess it is she who has done it.  They all say so.”

“Men!” the old woman cried fiercely.  “All men!  The two nurses as well.  There’s something about her that makes idiots of all of them.  She knows it.  And she revels in it.  It’s the breath of life to her.  She has played fast and loose with your father’s happiness for it.  And now she’s playing with his life as well.  And feeling, all the while, that it is a very noble repentance!”

“Repentance for what?” Mary asked.  “Rush said something like that.  I thought, before I went away, that father was getting reconciled to the Ravinia idea.  Do you think it was worrying about ...”