"Where is she?" he asked Mary. "I hoped I'd find her resting for
to-night." Evidently he had been up to her room to see. The relief was
plainly legible in his face when he got Mary's answer.

"She and Rush, eh," he said. "I'm glad they've made a start together, but
they ought to be back by now. They drove, didn't they?"

She couldn't inform him as to that and by way of getting him to come to
anchor, offered him his tea.

"Oh, I'll wait for the others," he said. "They can't be much later than
this.--I'm glad she's taken a vacation from those songs," he went on
presently from the fireplace. "She told me last night she'd been working
all day with Novelli over them. Only sent him home about half an hour
before it was time for her to dress for dinner. Do you suppose,"--this to
Wallace--"that they're as wonderful as she thinks they are?"

It was obvious to Mary that Hood's reply was calculated to soothe; his
attitude was indulgent. He talked to Mary about March as just another of
Paula's delightful extravagances. March's indignant refusal, at first, to
tune the Circassian grand, his trick of sitting on the floor under
Paula's piano while she played for him, his forgetting to be paid, though
he had not, in all probability, a cent in his pockets, were exhibited as
whimsicalities, such as Wallace's favorite author, J.M. Barrie, might
have invented. It was just like Paula to take him up as she had done, to
work away for days at his songs, proclaiming the wonder of them all the
while. "We're all hoping, of course," he concluded, "that when she's
finished with them to-night, she'll sing us some of the old familiar
music we really love."