"I have a hunch," he said, "that the two boys who are with them are officers out of uniform. I noticed that they looked the other way pretty carefully when that major who is sitting at the next table to ours came in."
"Let's dance again," she said. "I love this Hawaiian Moonlight thing."
He saw her take the opportunity that rising from the table gave her for a good square look at the party he had been talking about and some change in her manner made him say with quick concern, "What is it?"
But she ignored the question and stepped out upon the floor with him. They had danced half-way round the room when she said quietly, "One of the boys at that table is my brother Rush."
Baldwin said, "He has seen you, I think." He felt her give a sort of gasp before she replied but the words came steadily enough.
"Oh, yes, we saw each other at the same time."
He said nothing more, just went on dancing around the room with her in silence, taking care, without appearing to do so, to cut the corner where Rush was sitting, rather broadly. After two or three rounds of the floor, she flagged a little and without asking any questions, he led her back to their table. Luckily, Christabel and her Iowan had disappeared.
As soon as she was seated she asked him for a pencil and something she could write on—a card of his, the back of an old letter, anything. She wrote, "Won't you please come and ask me to dance?" and she slid it over to him. He read it and understood, picked up a busboy with his eye and despatched him with the folded scrap for delivery to Captain Wollaston at the end table.
Mary meanwhile had cradled her chin in her palms and closed her eyes. She had experienced so clear a premonition before she turned round to look at the party at the end table that one of those officers out of uniform would turn out to be Rush that the verification of it had the quality of something that happens in a dream. She felt a sharp incredulity that it could really be they, staring at each other across that restaurant. More than that, the brother she saw was not—in that first glance—the man she had been trying all day to make up her mind he would be. Not the new Rush with two palms to his Croix de Guerre and his American D.S.C.; and the scars in his soul from the experiences those decorations must represent; but the Rush she had said good-by to in the autumn of 1914 when he set out to be a freshman at Harvard, the kid brother she had counciled and occasionally admonished, in the vicarious exercise of her father's authority. And in his panic-stricken gaze at her, she had recognized his instinctive acceptance of that position. Exactly so would he have looked five interminable years ago if she had caught him in mischief.
Then, like the undertow of a big wave, the reaction caught her. It was intolerable that he should look at her like that. He who had earned his manhood and its privileges in the long death grapple with the grimmest of realities. Certainly she was not the one to cast the first stone at him. She must contrive somehow, at once, to make that clear to him. The urgency of the thing lay in her belief that the whole of their future relationship depended upon the removing of his misapprehension now—to-night.