When the train had rolled into the station, he went with the other pa.s.sengers as far as the door of the ferry-house to see-yes, they were going over the same ferry together, he still bending toward her as they walked, she with a charming, shy hesitancy in her manner, as of one unaccustomed to her position. Bill said bitterly, "The gall of him!" and walked away to the humiliating trolley which showed that he was still "going to Stevens'." If he had been out of bondage, he would have been quick to follow and take his place on the other side of the girl, and show to all men that she was not making one of an intimate duet.

It was after this that his mother noticed that on certain days his accustomed spirits flagged. Her keen ear detected that he no longer whistled cheerily all the time he was dressing, but only when he heard her foot upon the stairs; and although he still chaffed his admiring sisters at dinner, there was a bitter and realistic strain in the jesting that made them all sure that Willie could not feel well. He found fault with his food, also a thing unprecedented. His mother brought him pills which he refused to take, towering above her-she was a little woman-tense and aloof. When she taxed him with having something on his mind, he admitted it at once, in a tone that bade her go no further.

"It is nothing to do with myself," he conceded, with the spirit of a man looking at her from his baby-blue eyes. The woman in her bowed to it as she went down-stairs, with pride in him rampant in her heart, to deliver her report to the two sisters waiting below.

The Snow family had been settled in the town from its beginning as a suburb, some thirty years back; Mr. Snow having died-after losing money largely on his real-estate investments there-twelve years later, when Billy was an infant, leaving many unproductive tracts of land with large taxes appertaining to them. The Snows knew everybody in the place, rich and poor, and were consequently regarded somewhat in the light of a directory; the woman by the day, the cheap dressmaker, and the handy man or boy could always be achieved by applying to them, for they had an invariable acquaintance with respectable persons temporarily forced into filling these positions. They themselves, while adding to their own finances in various ways, neither concealed nor obtruded the fact; their affairs could interest no one but themselves. They lived in a very small old-fashioned white frame house with a narrow entrance-hall nearly level with the street; and the little low-ceiled parlor and sitting-room, with their narrow doorways and slightly uneven floors, were crowded with large mahogany and walnut furniture and bedecked with the birthday and Christmas gifts of the family for the last thirty years, from the cherry-stone basket once carved by Father to the ornamental hanging calendar of the past season. In the autumn the ladies potted plants with such acc.u.mulative energy that the rooms became more and more a jungle of damp pots and tubs, topped by overflowing showers and spikes and flat blobs of green. Only the family knew exactly where to sit without encroaching perilously on these; Billy's friends always dropped first into a certain chair and rocked into a dangling ma.s.s of Wandering Jew on the marble-topped table behind.

The Snows had the recognized position in society of being Asked to Everything. When they went to entertainments, it was in the dark, quiet garments of every-day life, or the one often remodeled state robe belonging to each, irrespective of what other people wore. Their circ.u.mstances and their birth were too well known to need pretense.

Ada, the second daughter, taught in a school. She was twenty-seven, tall like her brother, and with a fair, babyish face like his. It seems to be the rule in the pages of fiction, even at the present day, to depict unmarried women of this age as both feeling and looking no longer young-as a matter of fact, a girl of twenty-seven is rarely distinguishable from one of twenty-three, and is often more attractive.

Ada Snow had been, besides, one of those immature young persons who grow up late, and become graceful and natural in society only after long custom; at twenty, shy and awkward, she had usually been mistaken for sixteen. She was her brother's favorite, secretly aiding and abetting him in many evasions of the maternal law; she tied his cravats for him now, and got up little suppers for him, and he posed as her elder, in view of his height and large experience.

The other sister, Bertha, was a delicate and much older woman, dark-haired, lined and sallow, given to intermittent nerve-prostrations and neuralgia, yet keeping a certain sanity and strength of mind hidden beneath an acc.u.mulation of small interests. She seldom went out, but sat by a window in the sitting-room all day, screened by the steaming plants, embroidering on linen, and keeping tally of the persons who went up and down the street, the number of oranges bought out of a cart, and the frequency of the meetings of two servants over a boundary fence-incidents of note in themselves without further connection. She seemed almost inconceivably petty in conversation and idea, but if one were strong enough to speak only to the truth that was in her, she could answer. She was honest and she was loyal; she knew a friend. She had worked hard for her mother in her early youth-that little mother who now looked almost younger than she, as she came into the room from her interview with William, and sat down by her daughter to say, in a tone of the mother who believes no secret is hid from her: "William won't tell me what's the matter, but I know it's something to do with that girl at the Alexanders'. Willie is growing up so fast!"

"Oh, yes, if you mean Miss Linden," said Miss Bertha, in comfortable corroboration. "That's been going on for some weeks."

"Yes, I know; but he acts differently this time. Perhaps she's snubbed him in some way."

"No, he was there the other night, and he is to take her skating Sat.u.r.day. I saw the note open on his bureau. Maybe, after all, it's just being in love that upsets him."

"Yes, I really think that's all."

Miss Bertha put her work down on her lap, and smoothed it out with slender, nervous fingers, before rolling it up in a thin white cloth.

The daylight was beginning to go.

"He's got a rose she gave him,-never mind how I know,-and he keeps it wrapped up in tissue"-she p.r.o.nounced it "tisher"-"paper in his waistcoat pocket. He leaves it in there sometimes when he changes his clothes. And Ada says-you know that picture in the magazine that we all said looked so like Miss Linden? He's got it in a little frame. Ada says that it tumbles out from underneath his pillow once in a while when she's taking the covers off; I suppose the child puts it there at night and forgets it in the morning. Ada just slips it half-way back again when she makes up the bed, as if she'd overlooked it. He never says anything, and of course she doesn't, either."

"I hope the girl will not take his attentions seriously," said the mother, alarmed. She had known all this before, but it was a fashion of the family to talk over and over what they already knew. "I _hope_ she will not take him seriously."

"Mother! They're both so young." Ada, who had been leaning forward with her face in her hands and her chin upturned at a statuesque angle, spoke for the first time.

"Oh, that's very well!" Mrs. Snow tossed her head as one with experience. "He is, of course, nothing but a mere boy at nineteen, but a girl of twenty is years older. When a girl is twenty, she goes in society with women of _any_ age. I was married myself at eighteen-not that I should wish either of my daughters to do so."

"Well, you can feel safe about that, mother," interpolated Ada.

"William is very attractive, dear boy, and I could not blame any girl for being somewhat captivated by him; I should be sorry if Miss Linden allowed her affections to be engaged. She may not know that his career is mapped out before him. William will not be in a position to marry before he is thirty-six. William is--"

"The people are coming from the train," interposed Miss Bertha, waving back one thin hand to stop her mother's discourse-which she could have repeated backward-and scanning the hurrying file in the dusk across the street.

"Now you can tell how long the days are getting. Ada, come here. Mrs.

Leverich has on her new furs-the ones her husband gave her. Don't they make her look stout? There are the Brentons, I think that's a bag of coffee he's carrying. He has a long, narrow package, too, with square ends-perhaps _she's_ been buying corsets; if not, it must be a bottle of whisky. And there-who is that? Oh, I thought it was Mr. Alexander in a new coat; of course it's too early for him-they say he's been making money hand over hand lately. And here comes-why it's George Sutton!

Ada, Ada, bow! he's looking. He sees us waving-ah!"

There was a pause, in which an interested flush appeared on the cheeks of both sisters.

The mother murmured apprehensively, "They say _he_ is devoted to Miss Linden," but neither answered. Ada had benefited, like the other girls, by his attentions, she had been given candy and flowers and made one in his theater-parties, but it was the secret conviction of all three women that all his general attentions were simply a cloak for his real devotion to Ada. The others were just a circle-she was the particular one; and Heaven only knows how many girls in this circle shared the same conviction. His smile and nod now seemed to speak of an intimacy that blotted out all his preference for Miss Linden.

"You had better pull down the shade now," said Mrs. Snow, after a few minutes. "It's time to light the lamp."

"No, wait a moment-there's another train in." Miss Bertha's eyes pierced the gloom. "The Carpenter boys, those new people in the Farley house, and that's all. No, there's somebody 'way behind-I declare, it's Miss Linden! She's ever so much more stylish-looking than she was at first. I wonder she didn't come on the train ahead. Who can that be with her? Why-" there was a pause. "I suppose he must have just happened to get off with her at the station," said Miss Bertha in an altered voice.

"Oh, yes; I'm sure that's it," said Ada.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"What is all this that I hear about Dosia and Lawson Barr?" asked Justin abruptly, one evening when he and his wife were at home alone together, a rather unusual occurrence now. Either he was out, or there was company, or Dosia was sitting with them by the table on which stood the reading-lamp. Just now she was staying overnight with Miss Torrington, at the other end of the town, "across the track," practicing for a concert.

Justin had dropped his collar-b.u.t.ton that morning in the process of dressing, and the small incident was productive of unforeseen results.

The hunt for it had delayed him to a later train and a seat by Billy Snow.

"What is this I hear about Dosia and Lawson Barr? They say she has been going in with him on the express nearly every morning this month. She may have been coming out with him, too, for all I know."

"Who says so?" asked Lois, startled, but contemptuous.

"Billy, for one."

"I do not see what business it is of his."

"That hasn't anything to do with it, Lois. As a matter of fact, the boy wouldn't have told me at all if I hadn't happened to sit with him to-day; he's heard plenty of remarks on it, though, and he's cut up about it. They sat in front of us, some seats down, entirely oblivious of everybody; it might have been their private car. It gave me a start, I can tell you, when Billy said it was not the first time. Has she said anything to you about it?"

"Yes, I think she has mentioned once or twice that she had seen him on the train; I know he brought her home one afternoon when she was late.

But I haven't paid any particular attention; and, after all, there's no harm in it."

"Oh, no; there's no _harm_, if you put it that way-only she mustn't do it. You know what I mean, Lois. Dosia ought not to want to be with him."

"I suppose he comes and talks to her, and she doesn't know how to stop him."

"Perhaps."

"And you sent her out in his care that first night," said Lois. She felt unbelieving and combative; Lawson was so unattractive to her that she could not conceive of his being otherwise to any girl.

"Of course; and I would do so again under the same circ.u.mstances-that was an emergency. But that's very different from making a practice of it. You must tell Dosia, as long as she can't see it herself. Let her get her lesson changed to another hour and that will settle the thing.

Does she see much of Barr at other places?"

"No more than anybody else does; of course, he is more or less around.

But she knows _just_ what he is like, Justin; I told her all about him the first thing, and she hears it from everybody. I am sure you are mistaken about her liking his society, she told me once that it always made her uncomfortable when he was near her. I really don't think you need be afraid of anything serious."

"All right, then. Probably a hint will be sufficient; but don't forget to give it, Lois. She is very much of a child in some things."

"Yes, she is," said Lois, resignedly.

This having Dosia with them had turned into one of those burdens which people sometimes ignorantly a.s.sume under a rose-colored impulse. It had seemed that it must be necessarily a charming thing to have a young girl in the house. But to have a young girl who was always practicing on the piano, to the derangement of Reginald's sleep or to the inconvenience of visitors in the little drawing-room, one who had to be specially considered in every plan, and whose presence took away all privacy from Lois' daily companionship with Justin, was a doubtful pleasure. Even this rainy evening with Justin and herself cozily placed together was, after all, not hers, but invaded, if not with the presence, at least with the disturbing thought of Dosia.

There were all the little grievances which sound so infinitesimal, and yet count up to so much when sympathy is lacking. Dosia had lived in a Southern atmosphere and in a home which had no regular rule. She invariably wanted to play with the children at the wrong time, and yet perhaps did not always offer to take care of them when it would have been a help. If Lois was busy when Justin came home at night, she would invariably find afterwards that Dosia had swiftly poured into his ears-in nervous loquacity at being alone with him-all the domestic happenings of the day, so that every remark that Lois made was answered by a "Yes; Dosia has already told me." These slight threads, which Lois had treasured up from which to spin a little web of interest for her beloved, would thus be broken off short. Dosia also had a fashion of ensconcing herself unthinkingly in Justin's particular seat by the lamp, in which case he sat patiently and uncomfortably in an att.i.tude out of the radius, or else went up-stairs to the untidy sitting-room to read by himself, leaving Lois, with her teeth on edge, to keep company perforce with Dosia, to whom he would not allow Lois to make protest, avowing that he was not inconvenienced at all. He had an unvarying kindness and sense of justice regarding the girl. But the family was like the bicycle of concert-hall fame, built for two, and this third person jarred its running qualities out of gear.