They walked back to the parlors. Doctor Lanning and Marie were picking

up the rackets at the ping-pong table. Mrs. Whitney had gone into the

office for the evening mail.

Passing the piano, Gertrude sat down and swung around toward the keys.

Glover took music from the table. Unwilling to admit a trace of the

unusual in the beating of her heart, or in her deeper breathing, she

could not entirely control either; there was something too fascinating

in defying the light that she now knew glowed in the dull eyes at her

side. She avoided looking; enough that the fire was there without

directly exposing her own eyes to it. She drummed with one hand, then

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with both, at a gavotte on the rack before her.

Overcome merely at watching her fingers stretch upon the keys he leaned

against the piano.

"Why did you ask me to come up?"

As he muttered the words she picked again and again with her right hand

at a loving little phrase in the gavotte. When it went precisely right

she spoke in the same tone, still caressing the phrase, never looking

up. "Are you sorry you came?"

"No; I'd rather be trod under foot than not be near you."

"May we not be friends without either of us being martyred? I shall be

afraid ever to ask you to do anything again. Was I wrong in--assuming

it would give you as well as all of us pleasure to dine together this

evening?"

"No. You know better than that. I am insanely presumptuous, I know

it. Let me ask one last favor----"

The gavotte rippled under her fingers. "No."

He turned away. She swung on the stool toward him and looked very

kindly and frankly up. "You have been too courteous to all of us for

that. Ask as many favors as you like, Mr. Glover," she murmured, "but

not, if you please, a last one."

"It shall be the last, Miss Brock. I only----"

"You only what?"

"Will you let me know what day you are going, so I may say good-by?"

"Certainly I will. You will be at Medicine Bend in any case, won't

you?"

"No. I have fifteen hundred miles to cover next week."

"What for--oh, it isn't any of my business, is it?"

"Looking over the snowsheds. Will you telegraph me?"

"Where?"

"At the Wickiup; it will reach me."

"You might have to come too far. We shall start in a few days."

"Will you telegraph me?"

"If you wish me to."

Eight days later, when suspense had grown sullen and Glover had parted

with all hope of hearing from her, he heard. In the depths of the

Heart River range her message reached him.

Every day Giddings, hundreds of miles away at the Wickiup, had had his

route-list. Giddings, who would have died for the engineer, waited,

every point in the repeating covered, day after day for a Glen Tarn

message that Glover expected. For four days Glover had hung like a dog

around the nearer stretches of the division. But the season was

advanced, he dared not delegate the last vital inspection of the year,

and bitterly he retreated from shed to shed until he was buried in the

barren wastes of the eighth district.




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