“And Mary,” Miss Wollaston observed, “happens to be the one utterly unmusical person in the family.  She’s completely absorbed in the preparation for his opera however.”  Then after a little pause, “She may prove rather more explanatory with you than she has been with me.  She seems to take a certain pleasure in mystifying me.  In saying things in a matter-of-fact way that are quite astounding.  That’s the new generation, of course.  They talk a different language from mine.  It will be a comfort,” she concluded, rather pathetically, as they mounted the high steps to her brother’s door, “to talk the matter over quietly with some one to whom my ideas and standards are still intelligible.”

But this comfort was, for the present, to be denied her.  Mary had spent the morning in her room writing notes and was coming down the stairs when the church-goers came in.

She negotiated what were left of the steps in a single swoop, gave her visitor both hands along with the “Wallace!  How nice!” that welcomed him, and then, drawing back with a gesture which invited his scrutiny, said, “Well?  What do you think?—­Oh, but thanks for your note, first.  I’ve just answered it.”

Radiant was the word.  There couldn’t be any doubt of that.  And younger.  There was a twinkle of mischief that he had to go back-five years, anyhow, to remember the like of.

He had none of Lucile’s feeling that decency required one’s joy over an event of this sort to be of the chastened variety and he brightened in instantaneous response to the girl’s mood, but the mere impact of her left him for a moment wordless.

“You needn’t try to make me a speech,” she said.  “I know you’re pleased.  Not as pleased as you would be if you knew all about it, but ...”

“As pleased as possible, anyhow,” he said.  On that, amicably arm in arm, they followed Miss Wollaston into the drawing-room.

“I don’t believe we’ve seen each other,” she said, “since the night we had dinner together at the Saddle and Cycle, weeks and weeks ago.”

“No,” he said.  “I remember very well that we haven’t.”

Miss Wollaston had drifted away from them (occupied, as she so often was when there were no persons present in the formal status of guests, in making minute readjustments of pillows and things as a sort of standing protest against the demon of disorder), and having noted this fact he went on: 

“I didn’t come for the picnic tea you invited me to the other day.  If I’d known how the land lay, I shouldn’t have sent a substitute.  I’m afraid, perhaps, that was rather—­tactless of me.”

He saw the queerest look come into her face,—­enough in itself to startle him rather though it wasn’t without a gleam of humor.

“I was just wondering,” she explained, “whether if you had come that particular day, I mightn’t be engaged to you now instead of to Tony.”

Unluckily Lucile heard that and froze rigid for a moment with horror.  Then recovering her motor faculties, she moved in a stately manner toward the door.