He let himself in softly and started at the sight of Harriet's smiling face framed in the parlor doorway. His worst fears were confirmed. She was dressed in a dainty evening gown and had evidently enjoyed her visitor.
Stuart pretended not to notice the fact and asked her to play.
He fell lazily into an arm chair while the deft fingers swept the keys. As he sat dreaming and watching the rhythmic movement of her delicate hands, he began to realize at last that his little pal, stub-nosed, red haired and freckled, had silently and mysteriously grown into a charming woman. He wondered what had become of the stub-nose? It seemed to have stretched out into perfect proportions. The freckles had faded into a delicate white skin of creamy velvet. And what once threatened to be a violent red head had softened into beaten gold.
But the most charming feature of all was the deep spiritual tenderness of her eyes, blue sometimes, gray and blue sometimes, but always with little brown spots in them which Nature seemed to have dropped by accident the day she painted them. Stuart always imagined she had picked up a brown brush by mistake. He thought with a sudden pang of the possibility of losing her. She was twenty-three now, in the pride and glory of perfect young womanhood, and yet she had no lovers. He wondered why? Her music of course. It had been the one absorbing passion of life. Her progress had been slow for the first years, while at college. But during the past two years of training every lesson seemed to tell. He had watched her development with pride and brooding tenderness. And her eyes had always sparkled with deep joy at his slightest word of praise. For the first time it had occurred to him as an immediate possibility that she might marry and their lives drift apart.
He resented the thought with unreasonable anger. Of course she must marry. And he would have to give her up.
He began to realize dimly how much he owed to her of peace and happiness during the past nine lonely years. A sweet comradeship had grown between them deeper and more tender than the tie which binds a brother and sister, and he had taken it as a matter of course. He resented the idea of a break in their relations. Yet why should he? What rights had he over her life? Absolutely none, of course. He wondered vaguely if she were sly enough to have a sweetheart and let nobody know? Who was that fellow? Where had he met him before?