March had nothing to interpose here, it seemed, in Mary’s defense, for her pause gave him ample opportunity to do so.  He merely nodded reflectively and loaded and lighted his pipe.

“Well,” she demanded presently, “can you see now that there’s something more to it than jealousy?  Whatever I try to do, he fights.  When I wanted to begin singing again last spring, he fought that.  And when I wanted to give it all up, after he’d so nearly died, he wouldn’t let me.  And when I’d refused the best chance I’d ever had, for him, and then changed around and accepted it because of him, he seemed to hate me for doing that.  And he simply boiled when I told him I’d gone and got the money, myself, from Wallace Hood.”

“Yes,” March said, so decisively that he startled her, “I know all about it up to there.  That was Thursday afternoon, wasn’t it?  Go on from then.”

The interruption disconcerted her.  “There isn’t much more—­to tell,” she went on, but a good deal less impetuously.  “Except that we fought and fought and fought.  About eight o’clock that night I said I was going to the park to see the performance;—­just to get a rest from talking.  Mr. Eckstein was there and the Williamsons and James Wallace, so I asked them all to come home with us.  And Fournier and LaChaise, too.  And we got on your opera and LaChaise played part of it and then I read a lot of it with Fournier.  So they didn’t go home till after three.  John thought I was keeping them there in order not to be left alone with him.—­Well, what was the good of talking, anyhow?  We did get started again on Friday, though; all day long.  And Friday night we—­made up, in a way.  At least, I thought we did.

“Well, and then yesterday morning Rush telephoned out from town and said he thought John ought to come in to see Mary.  She wasn’t very well.  I told him to go if he liked.  I was feeling perfectly awful, yesterday, myself—­and I was billed for Thais last night.  There isn’t another soprano up here who wouldn’t have cancelled it, feeling the way I did.  But I told John that if he thought Mary needed him more than I did, he’d better go.—­I wish he had gone.  After he’d telephoned to say he wasn’t coming—­he’d talked to Mary herself, that time—­he kept getting colder and gloomier and more—­unendurable from hour to hour.  And after the performance, we had the most horrible fight of all.  He told me I had kept him away from Mary on purpose,—­because I was jealous of her.  He said he could never forgive himself for the way he’d treated her—­in order to curry favor with me.  And he said that the first thing in the morning he was going to her.  That’s all.—­Oh, well, I said a few things to him, too.  Do you wonder?”

By way of a flourish, she flashed to her feet again at this conclusion (she’d been up and down half a dozen times in the course of her appeal to him as jury), and walked away to a window.  But after the silence had spun itself out to the better part of a minute, she whipped round upon him.