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
expression in those faces that Paula wouldn't look at. The half-concealed
impatience, the anticipatory boredom, showed through so unfaltering a
determination to do and express to the end the precisely correct thing.
Even her father's anger looked out through a mask like that.

LaChaise, from his corner said something in French that Mary didn't
catch. Novelli straightened his back. And in that instant before a note
was sounded, Mary's excitement mounted higher. The absorption of those
three musicians, the intensity of their preoccupation, told her that the
something she had expected was going to happen--now. But she did not know
that it was going to happen to her.

Long ago the family had acquiesced in Mary's assertion that she was not
in the least musical and in her stubborn refusal to "take" anything, even
the most elementary course of lessons on the piano. She had been allowed
to grow up in an ignorance almost unique in these days, of the whole
mystery of musical notation and phraseology, an ignorance that might be
reckoned the equivalent of a special talent.

Later, indeed, she had made the discovery--or what would have been a
discovery if she had fully admitted it to herself--that music sometimes
exerted a special power over her emotions. Whether it was a certain sort
of music that created the mood or a certain sort of moo