She held Darby back a little.  “Must we go on feeling,” she asked, “that anything could happen any minute?  Or—­well, could Rush go back to the farm?  Graham Stannard has gone to New York, I think, they’re partners, you know, so he must be rather badly wanted.  And this waiting is hard for him.”

Rush could go, of course, Darby assured her.  “For that matter,” he went on with a quick glance at her, “why don’t you go with him?  Take your aunt along, too.  For a few days, at least.  You couldn’t do better.”

She demurred to this on the ground that it didn’t seem fair to Paula.  If there was a period of Arcadian retirement down on the books for anybody, it was Paula who was entitled to it.

But Paula, as Darby pointed out, wouldn’t take it in the first place, and, surprisingly, didn’t need it in the second.  “She told me just now that she’d slept eighteen hours out of the last twenty-four and was ready for anything.  She looked it, too.”

He understood very well her irrepressible shrug of exasperation at that and interrupted her attempt to explain it.  “It’s another breed of animal altogether,” he said.  “And at that, I’d rather have had her job than yours.  You’re looking first rate, anyhow.  But your aunt, if she isn’t to break up badly, had better be carried off somewhere.”  He glanced around toward Steinmetz who had withdrawn out of ear-shot.  “There are some toxins, you know,” he added, “that are even beyond him and his microscopes.”

Mary had meant to broach this project at dinner but changed her mind and waited until Aunt Lucile had withdrawn and she and Rush were left alone over their coffee cups for a smoke.

“Poor Aunt Lucile!  She has aged years in the last three weeks.  And it shows more, now the nightmare is over, than it did before.”

“Is it over?  Really?” he asked.

“Well, we don’t need miracles any more for him.  Just ordinary good care and good luck.  Yes, I’d say the nightmare was over.”

“Leaving us free,” he commented, “to go back to our own.”

“You can go back to the farm, anyhow,” she said.  “I asked Doctor Darby, especially, and he said so.  He wants me to go along with you and take Aunt Lucile.  Just for a week or so.  Is there any sort of place with a roof over it where we could stay?”

He said, “I guess that could be managed.”  But his tone was so absent and somber that she looked at him in sharp concern.

“You didn’t mean that the farm was your nightmare, did you?” she asked.  “Has something gone terribly wrong out there?”

“Things have gone just the way I suppose anybody but a fool would have known they would.  Not worse than that, I guess.”

He got up then and went over to the sideboard, coming back with a decanter of old brandy and a pair of big English glasses.  She declined hers as unobtrusively as possible, just with a word and a faint shake of the head.  But it was enough to make him look at her.