loved that the loss of the dream of it was like the
loss of existence. After a moment Dosia went on brokenly:

"It seems so strange. Things begin, and you think they are going to
turn out to be something you want very much, and then all of a sudden
they end--and there is nothing more. Everything is all beginning--and
then it ends--there is nothing more. And now I can never be really
nice again!"

"Nonsense! You'll feel very differently about it all after a while,"
said Lois sensibly.

"I don't want to go down-stairs again." Dosia began to shake
violently. "If he were to come back----"

"Well, stay up here. Zaidee shall bring you your dinner," said Lois
humoringly. "I must go down now; I hear Justin. Only, you'll have to
promise me to be quiet, Dosia, and not begin going wild again the
moment I'm out of the room."

"No, I'll be good," murmured Dosia submissively. "Oh, Lois, you're so
kind to me! I love you so much!"

Her head ached so hard that it was easy to be quiet now. She could not
eat the meal which Zaidee, assisted to the door by the maid, brought
in to her. It seemed, oddly enough, like a reversion back to that
first night of her arrival--oh, so long ago!--after tempest and
disaster. Yet then the white, enhancing light of the future had shone
down through everything, and now there was no future, only a murky
past, and she a poor girl who had dropped so far out of the way of
happiness that she could never get back to it, never be nice again.
That hand that had once held hers so firmly, so steadily, that she
could sleep secure with just the comfort of its remembered touch, the
thought of it had become only pain, like everything else. Oh, back of
all this shaming hurt with Lawson and George Sutton was another shame,
that went deeper and deeper still. Since that visit of Bailey
Girard's, she had known that he had thought of her as she had thought
of him, with a knowledge that could not be controverted. It is
astonishing that we, who feel ourselves to be so dependent on speech
as a means of communication, have our intensest, our most revealing
moments without it. He had thought of her as she had of him, and, with
the thought of her in his heart, had been content easily that it
should be no more.

Oh, if this stranger had been indeed the hero of her dreams,--lover,
protector, dearest friend,--to have sought her mightily with the
privilege and the prerogative of a man, so that she might have had no
experience