Part 32

"Vous name pas Wagner?" inquired Eugene, leaning toward her.

"Oh yes," she answered, bending her head far over, so that her face was concealed from him, except the chin, which, he saw with a thrill of inexplicable emotion, was trembling slightly. There were some small white flowers upon her hat, and these shook too.

She stopped playing abruptly, rose from the stool and crossed the room to a large mahogany chair, upholstered in red velvet and of hybrid construction, possessing both rockers and legs. She had moved in a way which prevented him from seeing her face, but he was certain of her agitation, and strangely glad, while curious, tremulous half-thoughts, edged with prophecy, bubbled to the surface of his consciousness.

When she turned to him, he was surprised to see that she looked astonishingly happy, almost as if she had been struggling with joy, instead of pain.

"This chair," she said, sinking into it, "makes me feel at home."

Naturally he could not understand.

"Because," she explained, "I once thought I was going to live in it. It has been reupholstered, but I should know it if I met in anywhere in the world!"

"How very odd!" exclaimed Eugene, staring.

"I settled here in pioneer days," she went on, tapping the arms lightly with her finger-tips. "It was the last dance I went to in Canaan."

"I fear the town was very provincial at that time," he returned, having completely forgotten the occasion she mentioned, therefore wishing to shift the subject. "I fear you may still find it so. There is not much here that one is in sympathy with, intellectually--few people really of the world."

"Few people, I suppose you mean," she said, softly, with a look that went deep enough into his eyes, "few people who really understand one?"

Eugene had seated himself on the sill of an open window close by. "There has been," he answered, with the ghost of a sigh, "no one."

She turned her head slightly away from him, apparently occupied with a loose thread in her sleeve. There were no loose threads; it was an old habit of hers which she retained. "I suppose," she murmured, in a voice as low as his had been, "that a man of your sort might find Canaan rather lonely and sad."

"It HAS been!" Whereupon she made him a laughing little bow.

"You are sure you complain of Canaan?"

"Yes!" he exclaimed. "You don't know what it is to live here--"

"I think I do. I lived here seventeen years."

"Oh yes," he began to object, "as a child, but--"

"Have you any recollection," she interrupted, "of the day before your brother ran away? Of coming home for vacation--I think it was your first year in college--and intervening between your brother and me in a snow-fight?"

For a moment he was genuinely perplexed; then his face cleared. "Certainly," he said: "I found him bullying you and gave him a good punishing for it."

"Is that all you remember?"

"Yes," he replied, honestly. "Wasn't that all?"

"Quite!" she smiled, her eyes half closed. "Except that I went home immediately afterward."

"Naturally," said Eugene. "My step-brother wasn't very much chevalier sans peur et sans reproche! Ah, I should like to polish up my French a little. Would you mind my asking you to read a bit with me, some little thing of Daudet's if you care for him, in the original? An hour, now and then, perhaps--"

Mamie appeared in the doorway and Eugene rose swiftly. "I have been trying to persuade Miss Tabor," he explained, with something too much of laughter, "to play again. You heard that little thing of Chaminade's--"

Mamie did not appear to hear him; she entered breathlessly, and there was no color in her cheeks. "Ariel," she exclaimed, "I don't want you to think I'm a tale-bearer--"

"Oh, my dear!" Ariel said, with a gesture of deprecation.

"No," Miss Pike went on, all in one breath, "but I'm afraid you will think it, because papa knows and he wants to see you."