her mother, "I forgot my ring."

The talk was saved alive by a frank effort. Dwight served, making jests
about everybody coming back for more. They went on with Warbleton
happenings, improvements and openings; and the runaway. Cornish tried
hard to make himself agreeable, not ingratiatingly but good-naturedly.
He wished profoundly that before coming he had looked up some more
stories in the back of the Musical Gazettes. Lulu surreptitiously
pinched off an ant that was running at large upon the cloth and
thereafter kept her eyes steadfastly on the sugar-bowl to see if it
could be from _that_. Dwight pretended that those whom he was helping a
second time were getting more than their share and facetiously landed on
Di about eating so much that she would grow up and be married, first
thing she knew. At the word "married" Di turned scarlet, laughed
heartily and lifted her glass of water.

"And what instruments do you play?" Ina asked Cornish, in an unrelated
effort to lift the talk to musical levels.

"Well, do you know," said the music man, "I can't play a thing. Don't
know a black note from a white one."

"You don't? Why, Di plays very prettily," said Di's mother. "But then
how can you tell what songs to order?" Ina cried.

"Oh, by the music houses. You go by the sales." For the first time it
occurred to Cornish that this was ridiculous. "You know, I'm really
studying law," he said, shyly and proudly. Law! How very interesting,
from Ina. Oh, but won't he bring up some songs some evening, for them to
try over? Her and Di? At this Di laughed and said that she was out of
practice and lifted her glass of water. In the presence of adults Di
made one weep, she was so slender, so young, so without defences, so
intolerably sensitive to every contact, so in agony lest she be found
wanting. It was amazing how unlike was this Di to the Di who had
ensnared Bobby Larkin. What was one to think?

Cornish paid very little attention to her. To Lulu he said kindly,
"Don't you play, Miss--?" He had not caught her name--no stranger ever
did catch it. But Dwight now supplied it: "Miss Lulu Bett," he explained
with loud emphasis, and Lulu burned her slow red. This question Lulu had
usually answered by telling how a felon had interrupted her lessons and
she had stopped "taking"--a participle sacred to music, in Warbleton.
This vignette had been a kind of epitome of Lulu's biography. But now
Lulu was heard to say serenely:

"No, but I'm