culiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual
possession that communicated a new strength to her. Lois was changed.
She had always been beautiful, as a matter of fact, but there was
something withheld, mysterious, in her expression, as if she were taking
counsel of some half-slumberous force within, as of one listening at a
shell for the murmur of the ocean.

Not only Lois, but everything else, seemed changed to Dosia, at the same
time being also flatly, unchangeably natural. She had longed--oh, how
she had longed!--to be back here. Even while loving and working in her
so-called home, she had felt that this was her real home, although here
her cruelest blows had fallen on her; even while bleeding with the
wrench of parting from her own flesh and blood, she had felt that this
was the real home, for here she had really lived; and it was the home of
the nicer, more delicate instincts. After the crude housekeeping, the
lack of comforts that made the simplest nursing a grinding struggle with
circumstance, it was a blessed relief to get back to a sphere where
minor details were all in order as a matter of course. The Alexanders,
with their three children, kept only one maid now; but even that
restriction did not prevent the unlimited flow of hot and cold water!

Yet she had also dreaded this returning,--how she had dreaded it!--with
that old sickening shame which came over her inevitably as she thought
of certain people and places and days. The mere thought of seeing Mrs.
Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing
through fire. One braces one's self to withstand the pain of scenes of
joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes,
there is little of that dreaded pain. It has been lived through and the
climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense,
more harrowingly real, than the reality.

Mrs. Leverich stopped her carriage one day to greet Dosia, and to ask
her, with a tentative semblance of her old effusion, to come and make
her a visit--an effusion which immediately died down into complete
non-interest, on Dosia's polite refusal; and the incident was not
especially heart-racking at the time, though afterward it set her
unaccountably trembling. Mrs. Leverich had in the carriage with her a
small, thin, long-nosed man with a pale-reddish mustache and hair, who,
gossip said, passed most of his time at the Leverichs'--he was seen out