Mary Wollaston | Page 3

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.
"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