As soon as she was seated she asked him for a pencil and something she could write on—­a card of his, the back of an old letter, anything.  She wrote, “Won’t you please come and ask me to dance?” and she slid it over to him.  He read it and understood, picked up a busboy with his eye and despatched him with the folded scrap for delivery to Captain Wollaston at the end table.

Mary meanwhile had cradled her chin in her palms and closed her eyes.  She had experienced so clear a premonition before she turned round to look at the party at the end table that one of those officers out of uniform would turn out to be Rush that the verification of it had the quality of something that happens in a dream.  She felt a sharp incredulity that it could really be they, staring at each other across that restaurant.  More than that, the brother she saw was not—­in that first glance—­the man she had been trying all day to make up her mind he would be.  Not the new Rush with two palms to his Croix de Guerre and his American D.S.C.; and the scars in his soul from the experiences those decorations must represent; but the Rush she had said good-by to in the autumn of 1914 when he set out to be a freshman at Harvard, the kid brother she had counciled and occasionally admonished, in the vicarious exercise of her father’s authority.  And in his panic-stricken gaze at her, she had recognized his instinctive acceptance of that position.  Exactly so would he have looked five interminable years ago if she had caught him in mischief.

Then, like the undertow of a big wave, the reaction caught her.  It was intolerable that he should look at her like that.  He who had earned his manhood and its privileges in the long death grapple with the grimmest of realities.  Certainly she was not the one to cast the first stone at him.  She must contrive somehow, at once, to make that clear to him.  The urgency of the thing lay in her belief that the whole of their future relationship depended upon the removing of his misapprehension now—­to-night.

She could not go to that table where he sat without seeming more than ever the school mistress in pursuit of a truant, but perhaps he would come to her if she put her request right.  They had danced together quite a lot in the old days.  She danced so well that not even her status of elder sister had prevented his enjoying the exercise of their combined accomplishment.

A horrible misgiving had attacked her when she had scribbled the note and closed her eyes, that the cocktails and the champagne she herself had consumed since seven o’clock might have clouded her judgment—­if, indeed, they were not responsible for the whole nightmare.  Would she be equal to following out the line she had set for herself?

But no trace of that misgiving was apparent to her when Rush, after a wait of only two or three minutes, appeared at her table.  She greeted him with a smile and a Hello, nodded a fleeting farewell to Baldwin and slipped comfortably into her brother’s arms out on the floor.  They danced away without a word.  There was the same quite beautiful accord between them that there had been in the old days, and the sense of this steadied her.  They had gone all the way around the floor before she spoke.