"How can anyone be chilly on such a night as this?"
"Come, Princess, and I'll show you some stars."
"Don't wander too far before dinner, children. Mrs. Penny and I will sit
indoors. Only youth can risk swollen joints."
"Yes," said Lilly, feeling herself rather terrifiedly past the fiercer
rush of life, "only youth."
They sat on a great overstuffed divan that faced the parapet, lighted
softly at each end by the first lamps of evening.
"Why, you poor child, you're shivering of chill! It's the damp. Let me
get you a wrap."
In the thickening silence Lilly sat alone looking out through the glass
doors. Bruce and Zoe were silhouetted out there against a fathomless
evening sky that was brilliantly pointed with a few big stars. But they
were not gazing out. Her face was up to his like a flower about to be
plucked, and, looking down into it, his whole body seemed to sway to its
sweetness.
Suddenly the ache in Lilly's heart was laid. With all of her old
capacity for the incongruous, but without any of her usual pump of
terror, she thought suddenly of her father, two nights hence, sitting
down to the creamed salmon and fried potatoes on Page Avenue, hanging
his napkin with the patent fasteners about his neck.
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