with Paula but had seemed genuinely to like her. In the spring of the
next year, 1915, she had, indeed, left home and had not been back since
except for infrequent visits. But then there was reason enough--excuse
enough, anyhow--for that. The war was enveloping them all. Rush had left
his freshman year at Harvard uncompleted to go to France and drive an
ambulance (he enlisted a little later in the French Army). Mary had gone
to New York to work on the Belgian War Relief Fund, and she had been
working away at it ever since.

There was then no valid reason--no reason at all unless she were willing
to go rummaging in that dark room of her mind for it--why John should
always wince like that when one reminded him of Mary. It was a fact,
though, that he did, and his sister was too honest-minded to pretend she
did not know it.

He answered her question now evenly enough. "She's working harder than
ever, she says, closing up her office. She wants some more money, of
course. And _she's_ heard from Rush. He's coming home. He may be turning
up almost any day now. She hopes to get a wire from him so that she can
meet him in New York and have a little visit with him, she says, before
he comes on here."

It was on Miss Wollaston's tongue to ask crisply, "Why doesn't she come
home herself now that her Fund is shutting up shop?" But that would have
been to state in so many words the naked question they tacitly left
unasked. There was another idea in her brother's mind that she thought
she could deal with. He had betrayed it by the emphasis he put on the
fact that it was to Mary and not to himself that Rush had written the
news that he was coming home. Certainly there was nothing in that.