This Mary's father saw and yet he laughed. A cruel laugh. He had felt for the moment a recurrence of the old jealousy. In his relief from it, he, a reassured lover, triumphed in the humiliation of one he had supposed his rival.
Mary managed to hide her face from him—superfluously because he wasn't looking at her—and thought up, desperately, a few more questions about how they were getting on at Hickory Hill.
But she went on feeling from moment to moment more horribly in the way, and at last with a simulated yawn she said she was going to bed. "This—vicarious success is rather tiring," she told her father; "almost as bad as vicarious stage fright." And then to Paula, "Is there any reason, if you're going to keep father here for two days, why I shouldn't steal a holiday?"
"Go away, do you mean?" Paula asked with a faint flush. "Why,—where would you go?"
"I could drive over to Hickory Hill," Mary said, "either by myself in the little car or with Pete in the big one. Whichever you wouldn't rather have here."
"I think that's a capital idea," John said. "Oh, you'd better take the big car with Pete. It would be rather a long drive for you all by yourself in the little one."
This was not the real reason, of course. He wouldn't want a chauffeur under foot while he was honeymooning about with Paula.
Owing to a late start and an errand which at the last moment Paula wanted done in Chicago, it was getting on toward four o'clock when Pete drove Mary up to the loading platform of the old apple house at Hickory Hill. The farm Ford was standing there idling in a syncopated manner and apparently on the point of departure somewhere. Where, was explained a moment later by the emergence of Sylvia Stannard in her conventional farm costume of shirt and breeches with a two-gallon jug in each hand.
"Oh," she said, "then the big car can take Miss Wollaston over to Durham, can't it?—so she won't have to ride in the Ford which she hates. How do you do? I'm awfully glad you've come. We weren't expecting you, were we? Was anybody, I mean?"
Mary allowed herself a laugh at this young thing with her refreshing way of saying first whatever first came into her head and letting this serve as a greeting, said she was sure the big car and Pete were equal to taking her aunt to the four-miles-distant village.