Mary Wollaston | Page 3

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.
"Why," she asked brightly, "don't you go to New York yourself and meet him?"
He answered instantly, almost sharply, "I can't do that." Then not liking the way it sounded in his own ear, he gave her a reason. "If you knew the number of babies that are coming along within the next month...."
"You need a rest," she said, "badly. I don't see how you live through horrors like that. But there must be other people--somebody who can take your work for you for a while. It can't make all that difference."
"It wouldn't," he admitted, "nine times out of ten. That call I got last evening that broke up the dinner party,--an intern at the County Hospital would have done just as well as I. There was nothing to it at all. Oh, it was a sort of satisfaction to the husband's feelings, I suppose, to pay me a thousand dollars and be satisfied that nobody in town could have paid more and got anything better. But you see, you never can tell. The case I was called in on at four o'clock this morning was another thing altogether." A gleam had come into his eyes again as over the memory of some brilliantly successful audacity. The gray old look had gone out of his face.
"I don't altogether wonder that Pollard blew up," he added, "except that a man in that profession has got no business to--ever."
The coffee urn offered Miss Wollaston her only means of escape but she didn't avail herself of it. She let herself go on looking for a breathless minute into her brother's face. Then she asked weakly, "What was it?"
"Why, Pollard...." John Wollaston began but then he stopped short and listened. "I thought I heard Paula coming," he explained.
"Paula won't be down for hours," Miss Wollaston said, "but I do not see why she shouldn't hear, since she is a married woman and your own wife...."
Her brother's "Precisely" cut across that sentence with a snick like a pair of shears and left a little silence behind it.
"I think she'll be along in a minute," he went on. "She always does come to breakfast. Why did you think she wouldn't to-day?"
This was one of Miss Wollaston's minor crosses. The fact was that on the comparatively rare occasions when Doctor John himself was present for the family breakfast at the custom-consecrated hour, Paula managed about two times in five to put in a last-minute appearance. This was not what annoyed Miss Wollaston. She was broad-minded enough to be aware that to an opera singer, the marshaling of one's whole family in the dining-room at eight o'clock in the morning might seem a barbarous and revolting practise and even occasional submissions to it, acts of real devotion. She was not really bitterly annoyed either by Paula's oft repeated assertion that she always came to breakfast. Paula was one of those temperamental persons who have to be forgiven for treating their facts--atmospherically. But that John, a man of science, enlisted under the banner of truth, should back this assertion of his wife's, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, really required resignation to put up with; argued a blindness, an infatuation, which seemed to his sister hardly decent. Because after all, facts were facts, and you didn't alter them by pretending that they did not exist.
So instead of answering her brother's question, she sat a little straighter in her chair, and compressed her lips.
He smiled faintly at that and added, "Anyhow she said she'd be along in a minute or two."
"Oh," said Miss Wollaston, "you have wakened her then. I would have suggested that the poor child be left asleep this morning."
Now he saw that she had something to tell him.