Then, like the undertow of a big wave, the reaction caught her. It was
intolerable that he should look at her like that. He who had earned his
manhood and its privileges in the long death grapple with the grimmest of
realities. Certainly she was not the one to cast the first stone at him.
She must contrive somehow, at once, to make that clear to him. The
urgency of the thing lay in her belief that the whole of their future
relationship depended upon the removing of his misapprehension
now--to-night.

She could not go to that table where he sat without seeming more than
ever the school mistress in pursuit of a truant, but perhaps he would
come to her if she put her request right. They had danced together quite
a lot in the old days. She danced so well that not even her status of
elder sister had prevented his enjoying the exercise of their combined
accomplishment.

A horrible misgiving had attacked her when she had scribbled the note and
closed her eyes, that the cocktails and the champagne she herself had
consumed since seven o'clock might have clouded her judgment--if, indeed,
they were not responsible for the whole nightmare. Would she be equal to
following out the line she had set for herself?

But no trace of that misgiving was apparent to her when Rush, after a
wait of only two or three minutes, appeared at her table. She greeted him
with a smile and a Hello, nodded a fleeting farewell to Baldwin and
slipped comfortably into her brother's arms out on the floor. They danced
away without a word. There was the same quite beautiful accord between
them that there had been in the old days, and the sense of this steadied
her. They had gone all the way around the floor before she spoke.