He said nothing more, just went on dancing around the room with her in
silence, taking care, without appearing to do so, to cut the corner where
Rush was sitting, rather broadly. After two or three rounds of the floor,
she flagged a little and without asking any questions, he led her back to
their table. Luckily, Christabel and her Iowan had disappeared.

As soon as she was seated she asked him for a pencil and something she
could write on--a card of his, the back of an old letter, anything. She
wrote, "Won't you please come and ask me to dance?" and she slid it over
to him. He read it and understood, picked up a busboy with his eye and
despatched him with the folded scrap for delivery to Captain Wollaston at
the end table.

Mary meanwhile had cradled her chin in her palms and closed her eyes.
She had experienced so clear a premonition before she turned round to
look at the party at the end table that one of those officers out of
uniform would turn out to be Rush that the verification of it had the
quality of something that happens in a dream. She felt a sharp
incredulity that it could really be they, staring at each other across
that restaurant. More than that, the brother she saw was not--in that
first glance--the man she had been trying all day to make up her mind he
would be. Not the new Rush with two palms to his _Croix de Guerre_ and
his American D.S.C.; and the scars in his soul from the experiences
those decorations must represent; but the Rush she had said good-by to
in the autumn of 1914 when he set out to be a freshman at Harvard, the
kid brother she had counciled and occasionally admonished, in the
vicarious exercise of her father's authority. And in his panic-stricken
gaze at her, she had recognized his instinctive acceptance of that
position. Exactly so would he have looked five interminable years ago if
she had caught him in mischief.