Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/60

 "really a little too much," all his sympathy, chivalry and love became hers.

The children were forming two and two for a march into the dining-room. There was ice cream yet to be eaten, and Edward's cake to be cut.

Ruth took a step toward the piano and made a slight grimace of pain, which caught her mother's all-seeing eye.

"Don't play them in, darling—if your back hurts you."

"But Mother Dear!" exclaimed Ruth with the smile of a suffering angel, "how can the blessed little angels march without music?" And she seated herself at the piano and played a jolly little four-square march that put a sense of time even into the least musical pair of feet. Edward himself became transfigured.

Suffocated all this time with repressed love for Alice Ruggles and her black velvet dress, he suddenly threw his right arm around her waist, seized her right hand in his left, and polkaed her out of the library, across the hall and into the dining room. . . Ruth's fingers lingered on the keyboard, slipped off and dropped listlessly to her lap. She closed her eyes, and straightend her hurt back. She made a little frown of pain.

"You're going to think me an awful baby," she