The dining-room of the Gray Inn overlooked thel sea, and was so close to the water one had the feeling of being in a boat, when looking out of its windows. There were two South American transports in the harbor. Some of the officers had come ashore and were dining with friends at the Gray Inn. Afterwards they stayed to dance a while in the long parlor with the young ladies of the party. Peggy and Georgina sat on the piazza just outside one of the long French windows, where they could watch the gay scene inside. It seemed almost as gay outside, when one turned to look across the harbor filled with moving lights. Captain and Mrs. Burrell were outside also. They sat farther down the piazza, near the railing, talking to one of the officers who was not dancing. Once when the music stopped, Peggy turned to Georgina to say:
“Do you hear Daddy speaking Spanish to that officer from South America? Doesn’t he do it well? I can understand a little of what they say because we lived in South America a while last year. We join him whenever he is stationed at a port where officers can take their families. He says that children of the navy have to learn to be regular gypsies. I love going to new places. How many languages can your father speak?”
Georgina, thus suddenly questioned, felt that she would rather die than acknowledge that she knew so little of her father that she could not answer. She was saved the mortification of confessing it, however, by the music striking up again at that moment.
“Oh, I can play that!” she exclaimed. “That’s the dance of the tarantula. Isn’t it a weird sort of thing?”
The air of absorbed interest with which Georgioa turned to listen to the music made Peggy forget her question, and listen in the same way. She wanted to do everything in the same way that Georgina did it, and from that moment that piece of music held special charm for her because Georgina called it weird.
The next time Georgina glanced down the piazza Mrs. Burrell was alone. In her dimly-lighted corner, she looked like one of the pretty summer girls one sees sometimes on a magazine cover. She was all in white with a pale blue wrap of some kind about her that was so soft and fleecy it looked like a pale blue cloud. Georgina found herself looking down that way often, with admiring glances. She happened to have her eyes turned that way when the Captain came back and stood beside her chair. The blue wrap had slipped from her shoulders without her notice, and he stooped and picked it up. Then he drew the soft, warm thing up around her, and bending over, laid his cheek for just an instant against hers.
It was such a fleeting little caress that no one saw but Georgina, and she turned her eyes away instantly, feeling that she had no right to look, yet glad that she had seen, because of the warm glow it sent through her. She couldn’t tell why, but somehow the world seemed a happier sort of place for everybody because such things happened in it.
“I wonder,” she thought wistfully, as her eyes followed the graceful steps of the foreign dancers and her thoughts stayed with what she had just witnessed, “I wonder if that had been Barby and my father, would _he_?”----
But she did not finish even to herself the question which rose up to worry her. It came back every time she recalled the little scene.
On the morning after her visit to the Gray Inn she climbed up on the piano stool when she had finished practising her scales. She wanted a closer view of the portrait which hung over it. It was an oil painting of her father at the age of five. He wore kilts and little socks with plaid tops, and he carried a white rabbit in his arms. Georgina knew every inch of the canvas, having admired it from the time she was first held up to it in someone’s arms to “see the pretty bunny.” Now she looked at it long and searchingly.