it now.
I couldn't rest until I got money enough to take her out of her pauper
grave and lay her by the side of her own people at home."

"And you have had a pretty hard time."

"Oh, that's nothing!" He squared his shoulders with unconscious rebuttal
of sympathy. "When I was a kid, perhaps--but I get a lot of pleasure out
of life."

"But you must be lonely without any one belonging to you," said Lois,
trying to grope her way into the labyrinth. "Wouldn't you be happier if
you were married?"

He laughed involuntarily and shook his head, with a slight flush that
seemed to come from the embarrassment of some secret thought. The
action, and the change of expression, made him singularly charming.
"Possibly; but the chance of that is small. Women--that is, unmarried
women--don't care for my society."

"Oh, oh!" protested Lois, with quick knowledge, as she looked at him, of
how much the reverse the truth must be. "But if you found the right
woman you might make her care for you."

He shook his head, with a sudden gleam in his gray eyes. "No; there
you're wrong. I'd never make any woman care for me, because I'd never
want to. If she couldn't care for me without my _making_ her--! I'd have
to know, when I first looked at her, that she was _mine_. And if she
were not, if she did not care for me herself, I'd never want to make
her--never!"

"Oh, oh!" protested Lois again, with interested amusement, shattered the
next instant as a fragile glass may be shattered by the blow of a
hammer.

The telephone-bell had rung, and Girard ran to it, closing the
intervening door behind him. The curtain of anxiety, lifted for
breathing-space for a moment, hung over them again somberly, like a
pall. Where was Justin?

The two women clinging together hung breathlessly on Girard's movements;
his low, murmuring voice told nothing. When he returned to where they
stood, his face was impassive.

"Nothing new; I'm just going to town for a couple of hours, that's all."

"Oh, must you leave us?"

"I'm coming back, if you'll let me." He bent over Lois with that earnest
look which seemed somehow to insure protection. "I want you to let me
stay down-stairs here all night, if you will. I'm going to make
arrangements to get a special message through, no matter what time it
comes, and I'll sit here in the parlor and wait for it, so that you two
ladies can sleep."

"Oh, I'd be so glad to have you here! Redge has that croupy cough again.
But you