Mary Wollaston

by Henry Kitchell Webster

And there was that.

It was not until late that night that his misgivings as to the part Mary might have played in this drama really awoke, but when they did he marveled that they had not occurred to him earlier. He recalled that Mary had prophesied during their talk at the Saddle and Cycle that Paula would attribute to her the suggestion—whoever might make it—that an operatic career for John's wife was desirable and necessary for financial reasons. She had said too, in that serious measured way of hers, "If Paula ever saw me coming between her and father, whether it was my doing or not, she would hate me with her whole heart."

Had that prediction been justified? There were half a dozen phrases that Paula had allowed herself to use this afternoon, which added up to a reasonable certainty that it was altogether justified. It was not easy for him to admit to himself that he didn't like Paula; that he knew her and had long known her for a person incapable of following any lead save that of her own primitive straightforward desires.

His self-communings reached down deeper into him than they had done for many a long year. He convicted himself, before his vigil was over, of flagrant cowardice in having allowed Mary to undertake the burden of that revelation. What harm would it have done any one, even himself, beyond an hour's discomfort, to have drawn down Paula's lightnings on his own head? Her enmity, even though it were permanent, could not seriously have changed the tenor of his ways.

But to Mary, such a thing could easily be a first-class disaster. Could John be relied upon to come whole-heartedly to her defense. No, he could not. Indeed—this was the thought that made Wallace gasp as from a dash of cold water in the face—John's anger at this interference with his affairs and at the innocent agent of it was likely to be as hot as his wife's. Momentarily anyhow. What a perfectly horrible situation to have forced the girl into;—that fragile sensitive young thing!

And now above all other times, when, for some reason not fully known to him, she was finding her own life an almost impossibly difficult thing to manage. He remembered the day she had come back from New York; how she had flushed and gone pale and asked him in a moment of suddenly tense emotion if he couldn't find her a job. It had been that very night, hadn't it?—when Paula had given that recital of Anthony March's songs—that she had disappeared out of the midst of things and never come back during the whole evening. When one considered her courage a flight like that told a good deal.

Then there had been that something a little short of an engagement with Graham Stannard, which must have distressed her horribly;—any one with a spirit as candid as hers and with as honest a hatred of all that was equivocal. The family had seemed to think that it would all come out right in the end somehow, yet the last time she had talked with him she had said, cutting straight through the disguise his thought had hidden itself behind, "I know I can't ever marry Graham."

And it was a young girl harassed with perplexities like these, whom he had permitted in his stead to beard the lioness. Well, if there was anything in the world, any conceivable thing, that he could do to repair the consequences of his fault, he would do it. If that lovers' misunderstanding with Graham could, after all, be cleared away it would be the happy, the completely desirable solution of the problem. But if it could not … A day-dream that it was he who stood in Graham Stannard's shoes, offering her harbor and rest and a life-long loyalty, formed the bridge over which he finally fell asleep.

She called him to the telephone the next morning while he was at breakfast; just to tell him she was in town, she said, and to ask him if he had heard anything from his sister in Omaha as to whether she wanted a nursery governess. He had to admit, of course, that he had not even written to her, and felt guiltier and more miserable than ever.

"Do write to-day, though, won't you?" she urged. "And give me the best character you can. Because I am going to get some sort of job just as soon as possible."