“Told me?” Paula swung herself off the bed and on to her feet in one movement.  “He told me nothing.”

“He urged you to carry out your Ravinia contract, didn’t he?” Mary asked, as steadily as she could.

Paula stood over her staring.  “Oh,” she exclaimed, and, a moment later she repeated the ejaculation in a drier tone and with a downward inflection.  She added presently, “I’m not clever the way you are at taking hints.  That’s the thing it will be just as well for you both to remember.”  She began bruskly putting on her dressing-gown.  “I’m going down-stairs to telephone to Max,” she explained.  “He’s got the paper all drawn up, not the final contract but an agreement to sign one of the sort I told you about.  I’m going to tell him that if he will bring it back with him now, I’ll sign it.”

Mary stood between her and the door.  “Don’t you think it would be—­fairer to wait?” she asked; “before you signed a thing like that.  Until at least, you were no longer angry with me for having told you too much or with father because he had told you too little.”

Paula pulled up at that and stood looking at her stepdaughter with a thoughtful expression that was almost a smile.  “I am angry,” she admitted, “or I was, and just exactly about that.  It’s queer the way you Wollastons, you and your father, anyhow, are always—­getting through to things like that.  What you say is fair enough.  I guess you’re always fair.  Can’t help being, somehow.  But I can’t put off telephoning to Max.  You see I called up John at Hickory Hill an hour ago.  I told him I had made up my mind to stop singing.  I told him I didn’t want any career.  That I just wanted to—­belong to him.  And I asked him to come to me as fast as he could.  He’s on the way now.  So it’s important, you see, that Max should get here first.”

CHAPTER XX

TWO WOMEN AND JOHN

Paula seemed calm enough after that one explosion but she moved along toward the accomplishment of her purpose, to get herself thoroughly committed to Max before John’s arrival, with the momentum of a liner leaving its pier.  Mary made two or three more attempts at dissuasion but their manifest futility kept her from getting any real power into them.  She was, to tell the truth, in a panic over the prospect of that evening;—­her father arriving triumphant in Paula’s supposed surrender to find Maxfield Ware with his five years’ contract in his pocket.  And the responsibility for the disaster would be attributed to herself; was indeed so attributable with a kind of theatrical completeness seldom, to be found in life.  It didn’t often happen that any one was as entirely to blame for a calamity to some one else as Mary was for this volte-face of Paula’s.

She did not run away altogether.  Paula, indeed, didn’t know that she had fled at all, for Maxfield Ware’s tardiness about coming back the second time supplied her with a pretext.