Part 10 (1/2)

Without effort, irresistibly, she swept him along with her into the music room.

Mary, when they were gone, let herself out by the other door as softly as she had come in. She fled down one flight of the stairs and a moment later had locked the door of her own room behind her. She switched on the light, gave a ragged laugh at Sir Galahad; then lay down, just as she was, on the little white bed, her face in the pillow, and cried.

CHAPTER VII

NO THOROUGHFARE

It was hours later, well along toward one o'clock in the morning when Rush coming into his room saw a light under the door communicating with his sister's and, knocking, was told he might come in.

He found her in bed for the night, reclining against a stack of pillows as if she had been reading, but from the way she blinked at the softened light from the lamp on her night table, it appeared that she had switched it on only when she heard him coming. She might have been crying though she looked composed enough now;--symmetrically composed, indeed, a braid over each shoulder, her hands folded, her legs straight down the middle of the bed making a single ridge that terminated in a little peak where her feet stuck up (the way heroines lie, it occurred to Rush, in the last act of grand operas, when they are dead) and this effect was enhanced by the new-laundered whiteness of the sheet, neatly folded back over the blankets and the untumbled pillows.

”You always look so nice and clean,” he told her, and, forbearing to sit on the edge of the bed as a pat of her hand invited him to, pulled up a chair instead. It was going to be a real talk, not just a casual good-night chat.

”We were wondering what had become of you,” he said. ”Poor Graham was worried.”

”Graham!” But she did not follow that up. ”I decided we'd had temperament enough for one evening,” she explained in a matter-of-fact tone, ”so when I saw I was going to explode I came away quietly and did it in here. By the time it was over I thought I might as well go to bed.”

”It doesn't look as if you'd exploded very violently,” he observed.

”Oh, I've cleared away the ruins,” she said. ”I hate reminders of a mess.”

It was like her exquisiteness to do that and it tightened his throat to think about it. He'd have liked to make sure what the cause of the explosion had been, but thought he'd better wait a while for that. All he ventured in the way of sympathetic approbation was to reach out and pat the ridge that extended down the middle of the bed. ”It certainly has been one devil of an evening,” he said.

”I suppose it has,” she agreed, thoughtfully. Then, noticing that this had rather thrown him off his stride, she went on, ”Tell me all that's been happening since I ran away. How did Paula act when it was over?”

”I haven't seen her,” he said. ”She never came down at all. Of course it must have been--well, in a way, a devil of an evening for her, too.

Though I can't believe our being there cramped her style very much in singing those songs. If it did, I'd hate to think what she would have done if we hadn't been. I hope March liked his own stuff. He was there all the while, you know. She must have had him tucked away in that little old room of Annie's that opened off the nursery. Somewhere anyhow, because long after every one else had gone, he came down-stairs with the Frenchman. I got one surprise just then all right. He's a private soldier, did you know that? Just a plain doughboy.”

”Overseas?” Mary asked.

”As far as Bordeaux, with the Eighty-sixth. Saxaphone player with one of the artillery bands. In a way I'm rather glad of it. That that's what he turns out to be, I mean.”

”Why?” Mary made the word rather crisply.

”Oh, well,” Rush explained uncomfortably, ”you know what it had begun to look like. Paula quarreling with father about him and not going down to dinner; and--cutting loose like that over his music. But of course there couldn't be anything of that sort--with a chap like that.”

”What is the lowest military rank,” Mary inquired, ”that you think Paula could fall in love with?”

The satirical import of her question was not lost upon him but he held his ground. ”It may sound sn.o.bbish but it's true just the same,” he insisted. ”A doughboy's a doughboy, and Paula wouldn't get mixed up with one--any more than you would.”

There was a silence after that.

”His music didn't sound to me like doughboy music,” Mary observed at last. ”Nor his going to Walt Whitman to get the words.”

”Was that Walt Whitman? It sounded to me as if he was making it up as he went along.” He had the grace to grin at himself over that admission, however. ”Oh, well,” he concluded, ”Paula's all right anyhow. I think she's--wonderful, myself. Only poor old dad! He is a peach, Mary. It's funny how differently I remember him. He acted like one real sport to-night.”

”Afterward, you mean.” Mary, it seemed, would not have characterized her father's behavior earlier in the evening in just that way. ”Tell me all about it. Only reach me a cigarette first.”

He obeyed the latter injunction with an air of protest. ”It's the only thing you do that I wish you didn't,” he said.