"There was a message for you while you were gone," said Dosia in a low tone.

His eyes a.s.sented. "Yes, I went there-to the place that they-but it wasn't Alexander, I'm glad to say, though I was afraid when I went in--"

"I know," said Dosia.

Another strange night had begun, with the master of the house away. Lois went to her room to lie down clothed, jumping up to come to the head of the stairs whenever the telephone-bell rang, and then going back again when she found that those who were consulting were asking for information instead of giving it, but by and by the messages ceased.

Suppose Justin never came back! She began to feel that he had been gone for years, and tried confusedly to plan out the future. There were the children-how should she support them? She must support them. It was hard to get work when you had a baby. If she hadn't the baby-no one should take the baby from her! She clasped him to her for a moment in terror, as if she were being hunted, before she grew calm and began planning again. There was only a little money left-to-morrow they must still eat. She must make the money last.

Dosia, on the bed by Redge's crib, went softly after a while into the other room, and saw that Lois at last slept, though she herself could not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger, so far removed was he from her dream of him; through all his softness, his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if n.o.body else did-though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too-that the fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up from the cruel circ.u.mstances of his early days without that hardening streak to uphold him. She divined, with some surprising new power of divination, that in spite of all his strong, capable dealing with actualities and his magnetic drawing of men, for the inner conduct of his own life he was shyly dependent on odd, deeply held theory-theory that he had solitarily woven for himself. She felt impersonally sorry for him, as for a boy who must be disappointed, though he was nothing to her.

Yet, as Dosia lay there in the dumb stretches of the night, her tired eyes wide open, close to Redge's crib, with his little hot hand clinging to hers, the mere fact of Girard's bodily presence in the house, down-stairs, seemed something overpoweringly insistent; she couldn't get away from it. It gave her, apparently, neither pleasure nor pain; it called forth no conscious excitement as had been the case with Lawson-unless this strange, rarefied sense was a higher excitement.

This consciousness of his presence was, tiresomely enough, something not to be escaped from; it pulsed in every vein, keeping her awake. She tried to lose it in the thought of Lois' great trouble, of this weighting, pitiful mystery of Justin's absence-of what it meant to him and to the household; she tried to lose it in the thought of Lawson, with the prayer that always instinctively came at his name. Nothing availed; through everything was that wearing, persistent consciousness of Girard's bodily presence down-stairs. If it would only fade out, so that she might sleep, she was so tired! The clock struck two. A voice spoke from the other room, sending her to her feet instantly:

"Dosia?"

"Yes, Lois, dearest, I'm here."

"Has any word come from Justin?"

"No."

Lois shivered. "I think, when Redge wakes up next, you'd better give him a drink of water, he sounds so hoa.r.s.e. I've used all I brought up. Do you mind going down to get some more? I would go myself, but I can't slip my arm from under baby; he wakes when I move. Here is the pitcher."

"Yes," said Dosia, stopping for a moment to pull the coverlet tenderly over Lois, before stepping out into the lighted hall.

It seemed very silent; there was no sound from below. Dosia went down the low, wide stairs with that indescribable air of the watcher in the night. Her white cotton gown, the same that she had worn throughout the afternoon, had lost its freshness, and clung to her figure in twisted folds; the waist was slightly open at the throat, and the long white necktie was half untied. One cheek was warm where it had pressed the pillow; the other was pale, and her hair, half loosened, hung against it. Her eyes, very blue, showed a rayed starriness, the pupils contracted from the sudden light-her expression, tired and half bewildered, had in it somewhat of the little lost look of a child, up in the unwonted middle of the night, who might go naturally and comfortably into any kind arms held out to her. The turn of the stairs brought her fronting the little drawing-room and the figure of Girard, who sat leaning forward, smoking, in the Morris chair, with his elbow resting on the arm of it and his head on his hand; the books and bric-a-brac on the table beside him had been pushed back to make room for the tray containing the coffee-pot, a cup and saucer, and a plate with some biscuits; a newspaper lay on the floor at his feet. Notwithstanding the light in the hallway and the room, there was that odd atmospheric effect which belongs only to the late and solitary hours of the night, when the very furniture itself seems to share in a chill detachment from the life of the day. Yet, in the midst of this night silence, this withdrawing of the ordinary vital forces, the figure of Bailey Girard seemed to be extraordinarily instinct with vitality, even in that second before he moved; his att.i.tude, his eyes, his expression, were informed with such intense and eager thoughts that it was as startling, as instantly arresting, as the blast of a trumpet.

At the sound of Dosia's light oncoming step opposite the door, he rose at once, and with a quick stride stood beside her. He seemed tall and unexpectedly dazzling as he confronted her; his deep set gray eyes were very brilliant.

"What is the matter? Is Mrs. Alexander ill?"

"No-oh, no; the children have been restless, that is all," said Dosia, recovering, with annoyed self-possession, from a momentary shock, and feeling disagreeably conscious of looking tumbled and forlorn. "I came down to get a pitcher of water."

"Can't I get it in the dining-room for you?" he asked, with formal politeness.

"Thank you. The water isn't running in the butler's pantry, I have to go in the kitchen for it. If you would light the gas there for me--"

"Yes, certainly," he responded promptly, pushing the portieres aside to make a pa.s.sage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as of the deep darkness of the night outside around everything.

A large white cat lying on a red-striped cushion on a chair by the chilly hearth stretched itself and blinked its yellow eyes toward the two intruders.

"Let me fill this," said Girard, taking the pitcher from her-a rather large, clumsy majolica article with a twisted vine for a handle-and carrying it over to the faucet. The intimacy of the hour and the scene emphasized the more the punctilious aloofness of this enforced companionship.

Dosia leaned back against the table, while he let the water run, that it might grow cold. It sounded in the silence as if it were falling on a drumhead. The moment-it was hardly more-seemed interminable to Dosia.

The white cat, jumping up on the table, put its paws on her shoulders, and she leaned back very absently, and curved her throat sideways that her cheek might touch him in recognition. Some inner thought claimed her, to the exclusion of the present; her eyes, looking dreamily before her, took on that expression that was indescribably gentle, intolerably sweet.

Dosia has been ill described if it has not been made evident that to caress, to _touch_ her, seemed the involuntarily natural expression of any feeling toward her. Something in the bright, tendril-curling hair, the curve of her young cheek, the curve of her red lips, her light, yet rounded form, with its confiding, unconscious movements, made as inevitable an allure as the soft rosiness of a darling child, with always the suggestion of that illusive spirit that dared, and retreated, ever giving, ere it veiled itself, the promise of some lovelier glimpse to come.

The water had stopped running, and Dosia straightened herself. She raised her head, to meet his eyes upon her. What was in them? The color flamed in her face and left her white, although in a second there was nothing more to see in his but a deep and guarded gentleness as he came toward her with the pitcher.

"I'll take it now, please," she said hurriedly.

"Won't you let me carry it up for you?"

"Thank you, it isn't necessary. I'll go along, if you'll wait and turn out the light."

"Very well. You're sure it's not too heavy for you?" he asked anxiously, as her wrists bent a little with the weight.

"Oh, no, indeed," said Dosia quickly, turning to go. At that moment the white cat, jumping down from the table in front of her, rubbed itself against her skirts, and she stumbled slightly.

"Take care!" cried Girard, grasping the shaking pitcher over her slight hold of it.

Their hands touched-for the first time since the night of disaster, the night of her trust and his protection. The next instant there was a crash-the fragments of the jug lay upon the kitchen floor, the water streaming over it in rivulets.

"Dosia!" called the frightened voice of Lois from above.

"Yes, I'm coming," Dosia called back. "There's nothing the matter!" She had run from the room without looking up at that figure beside her, s.n.a.t.c.hing a gla.s.s of water automatically from the dining-table as she pa.s.sed by it. Fast as her feet might carry her, they could not keep pace with her beating heart.

When the telephone-bell rang a moment after, it was to confirm the tidings given before. Justin was in Chicago.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _He came toward her with the pitcher_]

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Justin was in Chicago,-the fact was verified, and he would start for home on the morrow. There seemed to be no details, save the comforting one that Billy Snow was with him. After that first sharp immediate relief from suspense, Lois again felt its filminess settling down upon her, all the more clingingly each time, not to be fully dissipated, after all, until Justin's bodily return.

Girard had gone back very early to the Snows' to breakfast. He talked to Lois by telephone, but he did not come to the house; while Dosia, wrapped in an outward abstraction that concealed a whirl within, went about her daily tasks, living over and over the scene of the night before. The shattering of the pitcher seemed to have shattered something else. Once he had felt, then, as she had done; once-so far away that night of disaster had gone, so long was it since she had held that protecting hand in her dreams, that the touch brought a strange resurrection of the spirit. She had an upwelling new sense of grat.i.tude to him for something unexpressed, some quality which she pa.s.sionately revered, and which other men had not always used toward her.

"Oh, he's _good_, he's good!" she whispered to herself, with the tears blinding her, as she picked up Redge's blocks from the floor. She felt Lawson's kisses on her lips, her throat-that cross of shame that she held always close to her; George Sutton's fat face thrust itself leeringly before her. How many girls have pa.s.sages in their lives to which they look back with the shame that only purity and innocence can feel! Yet the sense of Girard's presence before was as nothing to her sense of it now-it blotted out the world. She saw him sitting alone in the dining-room, with his head resting on his hand, the quiet att.i.tude filled intensely with life; the turn of his head, the shape of his hand, were insistent things. She saw him standing in front of her, long-limbed, erect of mien. She saw-If she looked pale and inert, it was because that inner thought of her lived so hard that the body was worn out with it.

Neither telegram nor any other message came from Justin, except the bare word that he had started home. Lois was not expecting him until nine o'clock on the second morning, the early trains from town were coming out at inconvenient intervals, but just as Lois had finished dressing, she heard the hall door open and shut. She called, but cautiously, for fear of disturbing her baby, who had dropped off to sleep again.

Justin was standing by the table, looking at the newspaper, as she entered the dining-room. With a cry, she ran toward him. "Justin!"

He turned, and she put her arms around him pa.s.sionately. He held her for a moment, and then said, "You'd better sit down."

"But, Justin-oh, my dearest, how ill you look!" She clung to him.

"Where have you been? Why didn't you send me any word?"

"I've been to Chicago."

"Yes, yes, I know. Why did you go?"