Mary, fluttering about the rooms, came into the parlor and went out again at intervals. Sibyl had kindly relieved her of the task of entertaining Clayton. Remembering the story of his broken arm, Mary felt a deep sympathy for him, yet she had never been able to converse with him at length. He was so learned and wise, and at times so strange and silent, that he oppressed her. She revered him, but she could not talk with him. Besides, she had a letter to write to Ben, who was coming to Denver in a day or two, and she wanted to think about Ben and what she should say to him in that letter. The composition of a letter even to Ben was not always an easy thing; and though she still wrote to her father each Sunday, what she said to him was so brief, sometimes, that for all the space required to contain it she might have sprawled it on a postal card.
While Mary thought of Ben and studied for words and sentences before secluding herself to begin the actual work of writing, she gave thought also to Clayton and Sibyl, and was quite sure that Sibyl was kind and charitable in thus seeking to give pleasure to the lonely doctor who had been apparently at a loss in the Denver streets. And then, it came like a flash—what if Clayton should fall in love with Sibyl, and they should marry? It seemed to her that much stranger things had happened. And in contemplating this new and bright suggestion she built up a very pretty little romance, which had a marked resemblance to some of those which Pearl used to read. Romantic ideas fluttered in Mary’s pretty head as thickly as butterflies amid Japanese cherry blossoms.
When she began the composition of her letter, dipping her gold pen in the blue ink which Ben liked, Sibyl was at the piano and singing in a way to disturb the flow of her thoughts.
“But she has a beautiful voice!” thought Mary, laying down the pen and listening with admiration. “Wouldn’t it be strange if they should take a fancy to each other and marry?”
It appeared entirely possible, now that Mr. Plimpton had departed from Denver.
Sibyl was singing one of the old songs that touched the deep springs of the past, and Clayton with inexpressible yearning was wishing that the years between could drop away and he could be her willing slave again. The love that had been dead, though it came forth now bound about with grave-clothes, lived again, and spoke to his heart a familiar language.
“You remember the song?” she said, looking up into his face and smiling. He had come forward to the piano.
“Yes,” he confessed. “I shall never forget it. You sang it the evening you told me you loved me and would be my wife. I wish you had chosen another.”
“Why?”
She looked steadily into his eyes, half veiling her own with their dark lashes.