“Well, Mr. Markand? I understand you are musical. You play the piano?” asked Mrs. Daindrie. Quite abruptly she put her inapposite questions. “_Do_ have some more of the fish!” “I imagine you feel quite like a New Yorker.” She left him alone. All of them left him alone. He was of them all. They tightened into a unit--they became a family--they discussed some family event or listened with a sort of mystic understanding to unleavened words from Miss Laurence whom they seemed fond of, as one is fond of one’s own foibles. In these gusts of attention away from him, David was comfortable. It seemed to him that Doctor Westerling was not. There was a fragility about Mr. Daindrie. The skin was translucent and tight under the upstanding wave of his gray hair: the blue eyes were far in from the white tufts of his brow. His hands were very small. Even sitting there and taking the plate from the maid and thanking her, and listening with respect to the prattle of Miss Laurence, David felt that he was a little man who limped. Intelligent. Why did he have the sense of conflict between his intelligence and his gentility; the sense of his head bowing? In another way Mrs. Daindrie was slight. She had a freckled smile and the puffs of her brown hair blew out the laughter of eyes. She was satisfied, it seemed to David, with the perpetual courtliness of her husband. Against their mood he felt Doctor Westerling veering stiffly. He wondered if this was why he felt this grain of resistance in them all against the doctor. “Why, then, do they have him to dinner?” “But why do they have me?” He was a stranger, more so than Conrad Westerling. Yet, he was taking the soft patter of Miss Laurence less to heart. Could this possibly be of importance? The door had opened. “Come in, Hope.” Her mother spied her. “You may say good-night.” A little girl stepped carefully through shadows that lay from the door to the bright table under its hood of electric lights. She dashed swiftly to her father and jumped into his lap. She hid her face. “I said you might come in, Hope, to _say_ good-night.” Hope faced about and smiled with a mischievous triumph. She had had at least this moment from her mother’s precept. Her father placed her firmly on her feet. “This is my youngest,” Mrs. Daindrie explained to David. “I believe you have never seen her. Hope dear, don’t you want to say good evening to Mr. Markand?” “Why am I so little surprised?” said David to himself. What was there growingly strange in this quiet night? “Does she remember me?” He felt the hollowness of nervous strain, as the little girl of the car came up to him, held out her hand. “I know you already,” she announced quite clear and high. “Oh, do you?” said Mrs. Daindrie. “I know you also,” David spoke to Hope. Their words caused no great interest. Doubtless, on one of the occasions when he had been there before they had met. In the lack of concern the two felt protection.