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
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.