we went up-stairs. The scheme is to run a dairy, hog and poultry
combination on a manufacturing basis and then sell our whole product
direct to two or three customers in town, one or two of the
clubs--perhaps a hotel. Deliver by motor truck every day, you see, and
leave the middleman out entirely. It's the only way to beat the game.
Father saw it like a shot. He said it would take a lot of money, of
course, but he thought he could manage my share."

Mary relaxed just perceptibly deeper in the pillows and her eyelids
drooped again. "It's getting awfully late," Rush said; "don't you want to
go to sleep?" But he needed no urging to go on when she asked him to tell
her all about it, and for another half hour he elaborated the plan.

He was still breezing along on the full tide of the idea, when,
happening to glance at her little traveling clock, he pulled himself up
short, took away her extra pillows, switched off her night lamp and
ordered her to go to sleep at once. Her apparent docility did not
altogether satisfy him and two or three times during the hour before he
himself fell asleep, he sat up to look under the door and see whether
she had turned the light on again.

He was right about that, of course. The enforced calm Mary had imposed
upon herself as a penance for the tempest of emotion she had
indulged--she had lain without moving, hardly a finger, from the time she
remade that bed and crept back into it until hearing Rush coming she
switched on the light--had had a sort of hypnotic effect upon her. So
long as her body did not move, it ceased to exist altogether and set her
spirit free, like a pale-winged luna moth from its chrysalis to adventure
into the night. The light it kept fluttering back to was that blinding
experience with March while the music of his song had surged through her