“No, I don’t,” Lucile interrupted shortly.  “Your father was exposed, soaking wet, to a cold north wind, while he was driving forty miles in an open car.  That’s the reason he took pneumonia.  And it’s the only reason.  I don’t know what Rush may have been saying to you, but I’ve known your father ever since he was born, and I can tell you that Paula might have gone on making a fool of herself to the end of time without his dying of it.  He was—­fond of her, I will admit.  But he had a life of his own that she knows nothing about.  He was too proud to tell her about it, and she hadn’t wit enough to see it for herself.  That’s the truth, and this emotional sprawl she’s indulging in now doesn’t change it.—­Meanwhile, she is adding to her collection five new men!”

“I don’t believe,” said Mary quietly, “that there is one of them she knows exists.  Or wouldn’t poison,” she added with a smile, “to improve father’s chance of getting well.”

This won a nod of grim assent.  “There are plenty of them.  She could replace them easily enough.  But her hunger for their worship is insatiable.  For a while your father’s—­infatuation satisfied her.  She may have tried to pull herself up to his level.  I dare say she did.  But even at that time she could not abide Wallace Hood, though he was kindness itself to her, simply because he kept his head.  Unfortunately, this poor young musician was not able to keep his.”

It seemed to Mary, even when allowance was made for the bitterness of the desperate old woman, who then went on for the better part of an hour with her bill of particulars, that this must be true.  Paula must have lost her head, at any rate.  What Mary herself had seen the beginning of, must have gone on at an accelerated speed until it was beyond all bounds.  There had been few hours when March might not come to the house and none to which he did not stay.  There were whole days when Paula was hardly out of his company.  She took him about with her to people’s houses.  She talked about him when she went alone.  Those who had at first not known what to think, at last had come to believe that there was only one thing they could.

“I tried to suggest to her, quite early, before it had gone so far, that she was in danger of being misunderstood.  It only made her furious.  And John was hardly less so when I mentioned to him that I had spoken to her.  He would see nothing; kept a face of granite through it all.”

“Aunt Lucile,” Mary asked, after a little silence, “do you think she has really been—­unfaithful to father?”

Miss Wollaston hesitated.  “Should you consider the conduct I have described, to be an example of fidelity?”

“I mean, in the divorce court sense,” Mary persisted.

“That,” her aunt said, more nearly in her old manner than anything that Mary had yet seen—­“that is a matter upon which I have no opinion.”