It was a possibility that Mary had contemplated as early as that first night of all, when Paula, having sung his song, had come herself to find him in Annie’s old bedroom where she had him hidden and with a broken laugh had pulled him up in her arms and kissed him, unaware that she was not alone with him.  One kiss, as an isolated phenomenon, didn’t mean much, Mary allowed, but when a man and a woman who were going to be left alone together a lot, started off that way, they were likely to—­get somewhere.  And where the man was the composer of that love song and the woman the singer of it, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would.

But this was not the conclusion that she had come to when she stopped old Nat on his way down-stairs to turn March out of the house.  The evidence, Rush’s and Aunt Lucile’s, might seem to point that way but it didn’t, somehow, make a convincing picture.  I think, though, that in any case, she would have gone down to see him.

He had found himself a seat on a black oak settee in the hall around the corner of the stairs and his attitude, when she came upon him, was very like what it had been the other time, bent forward a little, his hands between his knees, as if he were braced for something.

“Mrs. Wollaston won’t be able to see you to-day,” she said.  He sprang to his feet and she added instantly, “I’m her stepdaughter, Mary Wollaston.  Won’t you come in?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and led the way into the drawing-room.

So far it had been rehearsed, on her way down-stairs, even to the chair in the bow window which she indicated, having seated herself, for him to sit down in.  She had up to that point an extraordinarily buoyant sense of self-possession.  This left her for one panicky instant when she felt him looking at her a little incredulously as if, once more, he wondered whether she were really there.

“I think, perhaps, you haven’t heard of father’s illness,” she began—­not just as she had expected to.  “Or did you come to ask about him?”

“No,” he said.  “I hadn’t heard.  Is it—­yes, of course it must be—­serious.  I’m sorry.”

She was struck by the instantaneous change in his manner.  From being, part of him, anyhow, a little remote—­wool-gathering would have been Aunt Lucile’s term—­he was, vividly, here.  It wasn’t possible to doubt the reality of his concern.  As a consequence, when she began informing him of the state of things she found herself pulled away, more and more, from the impersonal phraseology of a medical bulletin.  She told how the attack had come on; how they had put up a bed for him in the music room, where there was the most air, and begun what it was evident from the first would be a life-and-death struggle; she quoted what Rush had told her when he met the train.  “I agree with Rush,” she concluded.  “They let me see him, for a few minutes, this morning, just so he’d know that I had come back.  Yet it isn’t possible not to believe that he will get well.”