“Then you’ll have to go,” she said softly at last, “but don’t stay so long again.”  She glanced across at the top of the major’s head which showed a rampant white lock over the edge of his book.  “We miss you; and you owe it to some of us to come back oftener from now on.”

“I always will,” answered Andrew, quickly catching her meaning and smiling with a responsive tenderness in a glance at the absorbed old gentleman around the corner of the table.  “It is harder to go this time than ever, in a way; and yet the staying’s worse.  I’m giving myself until spring, though I don’t know why.  I—­”

Just then from the drawing-room beyond there came a crash of soft chords on the piano and David’s voice rose high and sweet across the rooms.  He had gone to the piano to sing for Caroline who never tired of his negro melodies and southern love songs.  He also had a store of war ballads with which it delighted him to tease and regale her, but to-day his mood had been decidedly on the sentimental vein.

“I want no stars in Heaven to guide me,
I need no......................
......but, oh, the kingdom of my heart, love,
Lies within thy loving arms....”

His voice dropped a note lower and the rest of the distinctly enunciated words failed to reach through the long rooms.  Phoebe also failed to catch a quick breath that Andrew drew as he began stacking a pile of blue-prints into a leather case.

“David Kildare,” remarked the old major as he looked up over his book, “makes song the vehicle of expression of as many emotions in one half-hour as the ordinary man lives through in a lifetime.  Had you not better attend to the safeguarding of Caroline Darrah’s unsophistication, Phoebe?”

“I wouldn’t interrupt him for worlds, Major,” laughed Phoebe as she arose from her chair.  “I’m going to slip by the drawing-room and hurry down to that meeting of the Civic Improvement Association from which I hope to get at least a half column.  Andrew’ll go in and see to them.”

“Never!” answered Andrew promptly with a smile.  “I’m going to beat a retreat and walk down with you.  The major must assume that responsibility.  Good-by!” And in a moment they had both made their escape, to the major’s vast amusement.

For the time being the music in the drawing-room had stopped and David and Caroline were deep in an animated conversation.

“The trouble about it is that I am about to have my light put out,” David was complaining as he sat on the piano-stool, glaring at a vase of unoffending roses on a table.  “Being a ray of sunshine around the house for a sick poet is no job for a runabout child like me.”

“But he’s so much better now, David, that I should think you would be perfectly happy.  Though of course you are still a little uneasy about him.”  As Caroline Darrah spoke she swayed the long-stemmed rose she held in her hand and tipped it against one of its mates in the vase.