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.
With an assumedly gay little cry she sprang to her feet.
“Come, come, what are you two children chuckling over?” she demanded, crossing the room abruptly. “Didn't you hear me say I wanted you to come and sing a quartet?”