lory, you had lost yourself, and--" But Billy would
hear no more. With her disdainful nose in the air she walked to the
piano.

"Come, Mr. Arkwright," she said with dignity. "Let's try this song."

Arkwright rose at once and accompanied her to the piano.

They had sung the song through twice when Billy became uneasily aware
that, on the other side of the room, Calderwell and Alice Greggory were
softly chuckling over something they had found in a magazine. Billy
frowned, and twitched the corners of a pile of music, with restless
fingers.

"I wonder if Alice hasn't got some quartets here somewhere," she
murmured, her disapproving eyes still bent on the absorbed couple across
the room.

Arkwright was silent. Billy, throwing a hurried glance into his face,
thought she detected a somber shadow in his eyes. She thought, too, she
knew why it was there. So possessed had Billy been, during the early
winter, of the idea that her special mission in life was to inaugurate
and foster a love affair between disappointed Mr. Arkwright and lonely
Alice Greggory, that now she forgot, for a moment, that Arkwright
himself was quite unaware of her efforts. She thought only that the
present shadow on his face must be caused by the same thing that brought
worry to her own heart--the manifest devotion of Calderwell to Alice
Greggory just now across the room. Instinctively, therefore, as to a
coworker in a common cause, she turned a disturbed face to the man at
her side.

"It is, indeed, high time that I looked after something besides lost
calories," she said significantly. Then, at the evident uncomprehension
in Arkwright's face, she added: "Has it been going on like this--very
long?"

Arkwright still, apparently, did not understand.

"Has--what been going on?" he questioned.

"That--over there," answered Billy, impatiently, scarcely knowing
whether to be more irritated at the threatened miscarriage of her
cherished plans, or at Arkwright's (to her) wilfully blind insistence
on her making her meaning more plain. "Has it been going on long--such
utter devotion?"

As she asked the question Billy turned and looked squarely into
Arkwright's face. She saw, therefore, the great change that came to it,
as her meaning became clear to him. Her first feeling was one of
shocked realization that Arkwright had, indeed, been really blind. Her
second--she turned away her eyes hurriedly from what she thought she saw
in the man's countenance.