-Billy's voice, deep and manly and confident, had yet a little
shake in it--"that nobody is going to marry you but me, and don't you
forget it. I'm no kid any more." Something in his tone gave his words
emphasis. "I know how to look out for you better than any one else
does."

"Dear Billy," said Dosia, touched, and resting her cheek momentarily
against the rough sleeve of his coat, "it's so good to have you back
again."

Lois, who had been longing intolerably all day for evening to come, so
that she could be alone with her husband, sat in the drawing-room,
trying to sew with nervous, trembling fingers, while her husband,
looking frightfully tired, and Bailey Girard smoked and talked--of all
things in the world!--of the relative merits of live or "spoon" bait in
trolling, and afterward went minutely into details of the manufacture of
artificial lures for catching trout.

Those wasted "social" hours of non-interest, non-satisfaction, how long,
how unbearably long, they can seem! Lois' face twitched, as well as her
fingers; she did not realize, as women often do not, that to Justin this
conversation, banal and irrelevant to any action of his present life or
his present anxiety, was like coming up from under-depths to breathe at
a necessary air-hole.

After five days of torturing, unexplained absence, to talk of nothing
but fishing, as if his life depended on it! Girard himself had wondered,
but he accepted the position allotted to him as a matter of course. He
had thought, from Justin's manner to-day, that he was to know something
of his affairs; but if Justin did not choose to confide in him--that was
all right. Possibly the affairs were all right, too; they were none of
his business, anyway.

[Illustration: "IT WAS SWEET TO BE CHAFFED, TO BE HEEDLESSLY YOUNG ONCE
MORE"]

Suddenly a word caught the ears of the two who were sitting in the
dining-room.

"That was the kind Lawson Barr used when he went down on the
Susquehanna. By the way, I hear that he's dead."

Lawson! Dosia's face changed as if a whip had flicked across it, and
then trembled back into its normal quiet. William leaned a little
nearer, his eyes curiously scanning her.

"Hadn't you heard before?"

"No; what?"

"He's dead."

"Lawson _dead_! Not Lawson?" Her dry lips illy formed the words.

"Yes, Dosia. Don't look like that--don't let them see in there, Girard
is looking at you; turn your face toward me. Leverich told us, coming up
to-night.