“All right,” John said curtly.  “You may go.”

He was so white when he rejoined Mary in the veranda that she sprang up with an involuntary cry and would have had him lie down, where she had been sitting.  But the fine steely ring in his voice stopped her short.

“Have you any idea,” he asked, “where she has gone or what she has gone to do?  She came down,” he went on without waiting for her answer,—­“and looked for me.  Waited for me.  And thanks to that—­walk we took, I wasn’t here.  Well, can you guess what she’s done?”

“It’s only a guess,” Mary said, “but she may have gone to see Martin Whitney.”

“Martin Whitney?” he echoed blankly.  “What for?  What does she want of him?”

“She spoke of him,” Mary said, “in connection with the money, the twenty thousand dollars...”

He broke in upon her again with a mere blank frantic echo of her words and once more Mary steadied herself to explain.

“Her agreement with Mr. Ware required her to put up twenty thousand dollars in some banker’s hands as a guarantee that she would not break the contract.  She mentioned Martin Whitney as the natural person to hold it.  So I guessed that she might have gone to consult him about it;—­or even to ask him to lend it to her.  As she said, it wouldn’t have to be spent.”

“That’s the essence of the contract then.  It’s nothing without that.  Until she gets the money and puts it up.  Yet you told me nothing of it until this moment.  If you had done so—­instead of inviting me to go for a walk—­and giving her a chance to get away...”

He couldn’t be allowed to go on.  “Do you mean that you think I did that—­for the purpose?” she asked steadily.

He flushed and turned away.  “No, of course I don’t.  I’m half mad over this.”

He walked abruptly into the house and a moment later she heard him at the telephone.  She stayed where she was, unable to think; stunned rather than hurt over the way he had sprung upon her.

He seemed a little quieter when he came out a few minutes later.  “Whitney left half an hour ago for Lake Geneva,” he said.  “So she’s missed him if that’s where she went.  There’s nothing to do but wait.”

He was very nervous however.  Whenever the telephone rang, as it did of course pretty often, he answered it himself, and each time his disappointment that it was not Paula asking for him, broke down more or less the calm he tried to impose upon himself.  He essayed what amends good manners enabled him to make to Mary for his outrageous attack upon her.  It went no deeper than that.  The discovery that Paula was gone and simultaneously that he need not have lost her obliterated—­or rather reversed—­the morning’s mood completely.

It was after lunch that he said, dryly, “I upset your life for you, half a dozen years ago.  Unfairly.  Inexcusably.  I’ve always been ashamed of it.  But it lends a sort of poetic justice to this.”