“What do you suppose this is?” he asked.  “It was lying on the bench in the hall.”

She held out a hand for it and together they opened it on the lid of the piano and investigated.

“It’s the manuscript of his opera,” she said.  “He brought it around to leave with Paula.  To tell her he had done with it.  He’s been trying to spoil it for her but he can’t.”

“I suppose I made an infernal fool of myself,” he remarked, after a little silence.

She blew, for answer, an impudent smoke ring up into his face.

He continued grumpily to cover his relief that she had not been more painfully explicit,—­“I suppose I shall have to make up some sort of damned apology to him.”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “That’s as you like.  I don’t believe he’d insist upon it.  He understood well enough.”

He looked at her intently.  “Has there been any better news from father since I went out?” he asked.

She shook her head.  “Except that there’s been none.  Every hour now that we aren’t sent for counts.  What made you think there might have been?”

He said he didn’t know.  She looked a little more cheerful somehow, less—­tragic.  Evidently her visit to the Corbetts had done her good.

His eye fell once more on the manuscript.  “Did he go off and forget that?” he asked.  “Or did he mean to leave it for Paula?  And what shall we do with it,—­hand it over to her or send it back?”

Thoughtfully Mary straightened the sheets and closed the cover.  “I’ll take care of it for him,” she said.

CHAPTER XII

HICKORY HILL

Pneumonia, for all it is characterized by what is called a crisis, has no single stride to recovery, no critical moment when one who has been in peril passes to safety.  Steinmetz and Darby were determined that Mary and all the household should understand this fully.  She had waylaid them in the hall as they were leaving the house together—­this was seventy-two hours or so after Anthony March’s call—­and demanded the good news she was sure they had for her.  There was a look about them and a tone in their voices that were perfectly new.

They would not be persuaded to say that her father was out of danger.  There was very little left of him.  His heart had been over-strained and this abnormal effect was now, in due course, transferred to the kidneys.  All sorts of deadly sequellae were lying in ambush.

But the more discouraging they were, the more she beamed upon them.  She walked along with them to the door, slipping her arm inside Doctor Darby’s as she did so.  “If you only knew,” she said, “what a wonderful thing it is to have the doctors stop being encouraging and try to frighten you, instead.  Because that means you really do think he’s getting well.”

“The balance of probability has swung to that side,” Steinmetz admitted in his rather affected staccato.  “At all events he’s out of my beat.”  His beat was the respiratory tract and his treatment the last word in vaccines and serums.