ng seven tennis balls in the air.

"There you are," he said suddenly, before it seemed that he could be
half-way through and began playing a dance.

"But you can play tunes!" cried Sylvia. "I thought you only did terribly
high-brow things. That's what Rush said."

"I was pianist in the best jazz orchestra in Bordeaux," March told her.

He stayed there at the piano quite contentedly for more than an hour.
Some of the musical jokes he indulged in (his sense of humor expressed
itself more easily and impudently in musical terms than in any other)
were rather over his auditors' heads. Parodies whose originals they
failed to recognize, experiments in the whole-tone scale that would have
interested disciples of Debussy, but his rhythms they understood and
recognized as faultless.

And Mary danced. With Graham when she must, with Rush when she could. The
latter happened oftener than you would have supposed.

"Those Wollastons can certainly dance," Sylvia remarked to her brother.
"I wonder they'll have anything to do with us. Let's just watch them for
a minute.--Here, we'll turn the piano around so Mr. March can see, too."

It was queer, Mary reflected, how easy it was for her and also, she was
sure, for her lover, to acquiesce in a spending of the hours like that;
how little impatient she was of the presence of these others that kept
them apart. She gave no thought to any maneuver, practicable or
fantastic, for stealing away with him, not even when, as the party
broke up for the night it became evident that chance was not going so to
favor them.

She realized afterward that there had been something factitious about her
tranquillity. What he had said in the moment before their first embrace
had been on that same note. He had been afraid to touch her for fear
that--as in a fairy story, or a dream,--she wouldn't be there. All that
afternoon and evening, despite an ineffable security in their miracle,
she had walked softly and so far as the future was concerned, avoided
trying to look.

Something in his gaze when he said good night to her, gave her a
momentary foreboding, though she told herself on the way up to the tent
she was to share with Sylvia that this was nothing but the scare that
always comes along with a too complete happiness.

But in the morning when her aunt told her that March had gone, she
realized that it had been more than that.

It was in the presence of the others who had gathered in the apple house