smile or look away.  Under cover of a rather wrangling discussion between Arnold and his stepmother as to having some champagne served, the older man continued to look steadily into Sylvia’s eyes, with the effect of saying to her, gravely, kindly, intimately:  “Yes, I am here.  You did not know how closely you have drawn me to you, but here I am.”  Across the table, across the lights, the service, the idle talk of the other two, she felt him quietly, ever so gently but quite irresistibly, open an inner door of her nature ... and she welcomed him in.

* * * * *

After dinner, when Mrs. Marshall-Smith lifted her eyebrows at Sylvia and rose to go, Arnold made no bones of his horror at the prospect of a tete-a-tete with the distinguished critic.  “Oh, I’m going in with you girls!” he said, jumping up with his usual sprawling uncertainty of action.  He reserved for athletic sports all his capacity for physical accuracy.  “Morrison and I bore each other more than’s legal!”

“I may bore you, my dear Arnold,” said the other, rising, “but you never bored me in your life, and I’ve known you from childhood.”

To which entirely benevolent speech, Arnold returned nothing but the uneasy shrug and resentful look of one baffled by a hostile demonstration too subtle for his powers of self-defense.  He picked up the chair he had thrown over, and waited sulkily till the others were in the high-ceilinged living-room before he joined them.  Then when Morrison, in answer to a request from his hostess and old friend, sat down to the piano and began to play a piece of modern, plaintive, very wandering and chromatic music, the younger man drew Sylvia out on the wide, moon-lighted veranda.

“Morrison is the very devil for making you want to punch his head, and yet not giving you a decent excuse.  I declare, Sylvia, I don’t know but that what I like best of all about you is the way you steer clear of him.  He’s opening up on you too.  Maybe you didn’t happen to notice ... at the dinner-table?  It wasn’t much, but I spotted it for a beginning.  I know old Felix, a few.”  Sylvia felt uneasy at the recurrence of this topic, and cast about for something to turn the conversation.  “Oh, Arnold,” she began, rather at random, “whatever became of Professor Saunders?  I’ve thought about him several times since I’ve been here, but I’ve forgotten to ask you or Tantine.  He was my little-girl admiration, you know.”

Arnold smoked for a moment before answering.  Then, “Well, I wouldn’t ask Madrina about him, if I were you.  He’s not one of her successes.  He wouldn’t stay put.”

Sylvia scented something uncomfortable, and regretted having introduced the subject.

Arnold added thoughtfully, looking hard at the ash of his cigarette, “I guess Madrina was pretty bad medicine for Saunders, all right.”

Sylvia shivered a little and drew back, but she instantly put the matter out of her mind with a trained and definite action of her will.  It was probably “horrid”; nothing could be done about it now; what else could they talk about that would be cheerful?  This was a thought-sequence very familiar to Sylvia, through which she passed with rapid ease.