spread down the table until it embraced a full half the length of it on
both sides and those just beyond the reach of it, aware that they were
missing something, listened but distractedly to the talk of their more
remote partners. And while she was doing all this she managed with her
left hand, as it were, to, keep going a vivid little confidential
flirtation with the Stannard boy, Graham, a neighbor and a contemporary
of hers just back from service on a destroyer.

The thing that stimulated her to all this was a consciousness of her
father's intense awareness of her. She had been deliberately evasive of
him since his quarrel with Paula. What he wanted of her she knew as well
as if he had expressed the need of it in so many words. He had turned to
her for it as soon as Paula had gone up-stairs and Rush had accompanied
the thoroughly demoralized Wallace into the hall. She had found a certain
hard satisfaction in denying it to him, in not nestling up into the arms
that happened, for the moment, to be vacant of Paula. This was so
imperative an instinct that she had not even reproached herself for it,
though she supposed she would later.

The sense that something in some way or other decisive was going to
happen to-night, quickened her pulse as she mounted, along with the last
of their guests to the music room, in response to Paula's message that
Mr. March had come and that the "rehearsal" was about to begin. She
looked about eagerly for a man who might be March but could not discover
him anywhere. Was he, perhaps, she absurdly wondered, sitting once more
under the piano?

Novelli drooped over the keyboard. LaChaise was half hidden in a deep
chair in one of the dormers. Paula, her back to the little audience,
stood talking to Novelli. Mary allowed herself a faint smile over the