“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-button 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 circumstances—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 assume 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 attitude 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.

It was the night after Justin’s charge to her that Lois nerved herself to broach the subject of Lawson to Dosia, who was copying some music by the table. Both her hair and her dress were arranged with a little new touch of elegance, but there was a droop to the corners of her mouth that had not been there before—a suggestion of hardness or melancholy or defiance, it would have been difficult to say which.

Justin was getting ready to go out, and Lois could hear his footsteps as he walked up and down above. She hated to begin, and her very reluctance gave a chill tone to her voice as she said temporizingly, “Dosia, please don’t keep Reginald out so late again as you did this afternoon. It is too cold.”

“We only went to the post-office; he said he was warm.”

Dosia, who had generously curtailed her practicing to take the mother’s place, felt ill-used.

“I know; but it was too late for him. His feet were as cold as ice. I am so afraid of croup.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dosia, in a low voice. “I won’t do it again.”

“Well, never mind that now.” Lois hesitated, and then took the plunge: “I want to speak to you about Lawson Barr, Dosia.”

Dosia’s color, which came and went so prettily when she spoke, always left her when she was really moved, or at the times when girls ordinarily blush. She turned pale now and her eyes became defiant, but she did not answer.

The other stumbled along, sorry and ashamed, as if she were the culprit:

“People have been commenting—I hear that he has been with you a great deal lately.”

“Where?” The girl’s voice was hard.

“On the train.”

“He went in to town with me twice last week, and twice the week before—yes, and yesterday. And he came out with me once.” She counted out the times as if they were a contravention. “I don’t see how I am going to help it if people speak to me, I can’t tell them to go away. I don’t want him to do it! Mr. Sutton took me over the ferry one day; was that commented on, too?”

There was a passion of tears in her voice, called forth by outraged modesty—and there is no modesty that feels itself more outraged than that of the girl who knows she has given some slight cause for reproof.

“Dosia, be reasonable,” said Lois, annoyed that her talk was being made so hard for her. “I know it’s horrid to be ‘spoken to,’ but Justin is very particular, and he feels that we are responsible for you. And, besides, you wouldn’t want it thought that you liked Lawson’s society. I am to go in to town with you to-morrow, and we will get the hour for your lesson changed.” She paused for some answer, but none came, and she went on: “I told Justin that he need not worry, there was no danger of your caring too much for Lawson! That’s nonsense. Why, you know all about him, and just what he amounts to. But, of course, if you are seen with him——”

“You need not say any more. I never want to speak to him again!” said Dosia, strangling. She swept her things from the table and rushed up to her own room in a whirlwind of indignation and shame, scathed by the imputation in Lois’ tone. The bubble of her imagining of Lawson was pricked for the moment by it; it is hard to idealize what another despises. She felt herself as false to her own estimate of him as she had hitherto been to the public one.

She threw herself upon the bed face downward. Something that she had been unconsciously dreading had come upon her—the notice of her little world. Before it had been voiced to her by Lois she had persistently considered herself unseen. She cried out now that there was no occasion for her being “spoken to,” yet she knew with a deep acknowledgment that she had not been quite true to her highest instincts.

The exquisitely sensitive perception which is an inherent part of innocence was hers. The Dosia who at twelve could not be induced to enter a room when a certain man was in it, because she “did not like the way he looked at her,” had as unerring an instinct now as then; it was an instinct so deep, so interwoven with every pulse of her nature, that to deny it ever so little was a spiritual hurt. She could not have told why certain subjects, certain joking expressions even, revolted her so that she shrank from them involuntarily. She could not have told why she knew there was something about Lawson different from the other men she had been accustomed to. Dosia not only knew nothing of the practice of evil, she knew nothing of life nor the laws of it; but it could never be said of her that she did not know when right bordered on wrong. She knew—and it would have been impossible for her not to have known—her slightest deviation from that shining road which can only be followed by white feet. Her first quick idea of Lawson as not the kind of man that she would ever want to marry still held good. Back of all this was the image of the true prince.

There are people whose natures we always feel electrically, a sensation which depends neither on liking nor on disliking, and which often partakes of both. When we meet them there is always a slight shock, a psychic tingling, a displacement of values, that makes us uncertain of our pathway; the colors seen in this artificial light are different from those seen by day. Barr affected Dosia thus. If he came into a room, she knew it at once; dancing or walking or talking with others, she felt his eyes upon her, disquieting her and making her conscious of his presence, so that she could not get up or sit down naturally. When he was not there, everything was flat and uninteresting in the withdrawal of this exciting disquietude. If she met his remarks cleverly, it gave her a delighted occupation for hours in recalling them; if she failed in repartee, and was “thick” and school-girlish, her cheeks would burn and the taste for life would leave her; she could hardly wait to see him again to retrieve herself. She was not in love with Barr, she was not even in love with love,—a fairly healthful process,—but she was in love with the excitement of his presence.

She had been shy of him at first, waiting for him to seek her. After the night of the bazaar and that wondrous waltz, she had felt that he must fly to speak to her at the nearest opportunity, and tell her that he had played for her, and her alone; and in return she had longed to assure him of her divining sympathy. But he did not come. She invented many excuses for this, but it gave her a sharp disappointment of which he was necessarily unconscious. As she met him casually at different places,—with the old quizzical gleam in his eye, and that peculiar manner,—his lightest word became fraught with deep meaning, over which she pondered, refusing to believe that the world she lived in was entirely of her own creation. In these last two months she had always an undercurrent of thought for him, whether she was practicing or sewing, or chaffing with Billy, or receiving the gallant but somewhat heavy attentions of Mr. Sutton. With Lawson’s avoidance of her had come a childish, uncalculating’ impulse to attract. Dosia had not told the truth when she said that she could not help his speaking to her; she knew very well the morning he would have passed her by in the train, as usual, if her eyes had not met his. Barr never presumed,—he knew the place allotted to him,—but he accepted permission. When he sat down by her, she swiftly wished him away again; yet her heart beat under his cool glance—a glance which seemed to read her every thought. These interviews, in which the conversations were of the lightest, yet in which she felt subtle intimations, were a delicious and stinging pleasure, like eating ice.

There had been a fitful burst of suburban gayety about Christmas-time and after—a delightful flare that burned up red and glowing, only to sink back gradually into the darkness of monotony. There was that fall into a hum-drum condition of living, instigated by bad weather, which shuts up each household into itself; the men were kept later down-town, and the women had the usual influx of winter colds and minor maladies which interfere with planned festivities. The younger sort had engagements, individually and collectively, for “things in town,” either coming out on the last train or staying comfortably overnight with friends. An assembly dance planned for Shrove Tuesday had fallen through.

The fairy glamour was already gone for Dosia. The personal note which she had missed at first was everything, and she found it nowhere but in Lawson. If she could have poured out her thoughts and feelings to Lois,—“talked things over,” girl-fashion,—if Lois had been her friend and lover—But Lois had no room for her; Dosia had learned to feel all the bitterness of the alien. And she was shy with the pleasant but self-sufficient women whom she met socially, and who were so intimate with one another; Dosia merely sat on the edge of conversations, so to speak, and smiled. She could not learn this assured fluency. The very children were hedged in from her by restrictions. To give up those little incidental meetings with Lawson was to give up the one silver string on which hung happiness, and yet—and yet—Dosia felt the sting of Lois’ matter-of-fact contempt for him; it lowered him indescribably. All women look down upon a man who will allow himself to be despised. She had cherished an ideal of him as a man lonely, misunderstood, terribly handicapped by opinion, by his own nature even, and yet capable of good and noble things. She had thought——

“Dosia?”

“Well?”

“Will you shut your door? The light streams down here and keeps Reginald from going to sleep. He waked when you went up-stairs.”

Dosia rose and closed the door noiselessly; she would have liked to shut it with a bang. It was a climax. There seemed to be nothing that she could do in this house that was right! Her attitude had ceased to be only that of an alien, it was that of an antagonist; but it was also that of a lonely and unguarded child.