That she was deeply troubled about her present relation with John and in general about John himself, would have been plain to a less penetrating eye than Anthony’s.  There was no open quarrel between them.  Wollaston dropped into the music room sometimes, late in the afternoon, to ask how the opera was getting along.  His manner to March on these occasions was one of, perhaps, slightly overwrought politeness, but the intention of it did not seem hostile.  Toward Paula he presented the image of humorous, affectionate concern, the standard behavior of the perfect husband.

It was Paula, on these occasions, who gave the show away, betraying by a self-conscious eagerness to make him welcome, the fact that he was not.  She made the mistake of telling him he looked tired and worried, facts too glaringly true to be bandied about in the presence of a stranger.  He looked to March as if he were approaching the elastic limit of complete exhaustion.  That it looked pretty much like that to Paula herself was made evident from the way she once spoke about him, her eyes full of tears, after he had left the room.

“He’s working so insanely hard,” she said.  “Nights as well as days.  I don’t believe he’s had five hours’ consecutive sleep this week.”

When March wanted to know why he did it, she hesitated, but gave him, at last, a candid answer.  No one else would have answered it at all.

“I don’t think it can be because he feels he has to,” she said.  “To earn the money, I mean.  Of course, he’s been buying a big farm, half of it, for Rush.  But he said the other day that if I needed any extra money for this”—­she nodded toward the score on the piano—­“I was to let him know.  Of course, he isn’t happy about it and I suppose it makes him take things harder.”

Naturally enough, March agreed with her here.  John Wollaston was clearly a member of the gold coast class.  It wasn’t thinkable that his financial difficulties could be real.  The unreality of them was, of course, the measure of the genuineness of his fear of losing Paula,—­of seeing the main current of her life shift once more to its old channel.  Did Paula see that, March wondered?  What was it she foresaw?

He got a partial answer one day in the course of one of their quarrels about the opera.  He had unguardedly given expression to his growing despondency about it.

“This thing can’t go,” he had said.  “It’s getting more lifeless from week to week.  We’re draining all the blood out of it and this stuff we’re putting in is sawdust.”

She whipped round upon him in a sudden tempest.  “It’s got to go,” she said.  “It’s got to be made to go.  If what you’re putting into it is sawdust, take it out.  Put some heart into it.”

He had been staring gloomily at the score.  Now he turned away from it.  “That’s what I don’t seem able to do,” he said.