"Just you and Aunt Tillie? Is your father dead?" he asked.
She closed her eyes a moment and then clasped her knees again.
"I don't like to talk about family matters."
"Oh, I——"
And then, gently, she added,
"I never talk about them to any one."
"Oh, I'm sorry," said Peter, aware of the undercurrent of sadness in her voice. "I didn't know that there was anything painful to you——"
"I didn't know it myself, until you played it to me, just now, the piece with the sad, low voices, under the melody. It was like somebody dead speakin' to me. I can't talk about the things I feel like that."
"Don't then——Forgive me for asking."
He laid his fingers softly over hers. She withdrew her hand quickly, but the look that she turned him found his face sober, his dark eyes warm with sympathy. And then with a swift inconsequential impulse born of Peter's recantation,