NOVEMBER
They walked back to the parlors. Doctor Lanning and Marie were picking up the rackets at the ping-pong table. Mrs. Whitney had gone into the office for the evening mail.
Passing the piano, Gertrude sat down and swung around toward the keys. Glover took music from the table. Unwilling to admit a trace of the unusual in the beating of her heart, or in her deeper breathing, she could not entirely control either; there was something too fascinating in defying the light that she now knew glowed in the dull eyes at her side. She avoided looking; enough that the fire was there without directly exposing her own eyes to it. She drummed with one hand, then with both, at a gavotte on the rack before her.
Overcome merely at watching her fingers stretch upon the keys he leaned against the piano.
"Why did you ask me to come up?"
As he muttered the words she picked again and again with her right hand at a loving little phrase in the gavotte. When it went precisely right she spoke in the same tone, still caressing the phrase, never looking up. "Are you sorry you came?"
"No; I'd rather be trod under foot than not be near you."
"May we not be friends without either of us being martyred? I shall be afraid ever to ask you to do anything again. Was I wrong in—assuming it would give you as well as all of us pleasure to dine together this evening?"
"No. You know better than that. I am insanely presumptuous, I know it. Let me ask one last favor——"
The gavotte rippled under her fingers. "No."