"Mind if I smoke?"
"Of course not."
"All right, here goes." He took one or two long comforting puffs at his pipe. "Let's side-track the hospital for the present. Might as well since it's only an air-castle, as Lois says. I'm a bit frazzled to-night. Can't seem to get the Curry baby off my chest. Suppose you play something instead. Nothing too classic--just agreeable and anæsthetic."
Sylvia went to the piano and sat down. Her fingers drifted into a nocturne. Save for the soft music and the crackling of the logs on the hearth there was no sound in the room. Tom Daly sat staring into the leaping flames and smoked stolidly. It would have made an appropriate picture for a woman's magazine cover. The gracious, comfortable room, the tired man, basking in home peace and contentment after the labor and stress of the day; the young girl at the piano, with healing and sympathy, wordless but no less apparent in her finger tips. Only in a woman's magazine the musician would no doubt have been the man's wife. Life is sometimes oddly different from magazine covers.
It was nearly an hour before Lois returned to the living-room. She paused a moment on the threshold.
"Oh, so you aren't building hospitals after all? Forgive me for being such a bad hostess, Sylvia. Was that Brahms?"
Sylvia shook her head with a smile.
"I don't know what it was," she admitted. "Something I heard in my dreams maybe. Did I put you to sleep Doctor Tom?"
"No, just soothed the savage in me. I feel fairly pacific at the moment. Don't stop."
"Ah, but I must. Felicia will think I am lost." She rose as she spoke and Doctor Tom rose too. "Don't come," she protested. "It is too absurd when it's only such a step."