Expectation had been unwarrantedly raised so high in the suddenly sanguine heart of Lois that now, to-night, at Girard’s word that nothing more had been heard, as she was still looking up at him everything turned black before her. She found herself half lying on the little spindle-legged sofa, without knowing how she got there, her head pillowed on a green silken cushion, with Dosia fanning her, while Girard leaned against the little mirrored mantelpiece with set face and contracted brows. Presently Lois pushed away the fan, made a motion as if to rise, only to relapse again on the cushion; she looked up at Girard and tried to smile with piteous, brimming eyes.
“Ah, don’t!” he said, with a quick gesture. His voice had an odd sound, as if drawing breath hurt him, yet with it mingled also a compassionate tenderness so great that it seemed to inform not only his face but his whole attitude as he bent over her.
“You’re very good to be so sorry for me,” she whispered.
He made a swift gesture of protest. “There’s one thing I can’t stand—to see a woman suffer.”
She waited a moment, as if to take in his words, and then motioned him to the seat beside her. When she spoke again, it was slowly, as if she were trying to concentrate her mind:
“You have known sorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
He saw that she wished to forget her own trouble for a moment in that of another, yet the effort to obey evidently cost him much. They had both spoken as if they two were alone in the room. Dosia, who had withdrawn to the ottoman some paces away, out of the radius of the lamp, sat there in her white cotton frock, leaning a little forward, her hands clasped loosely in her lap, her face upraised and her eyes looking somewhere beyond. So still was she, so gentle, so fair, that she might have been a spirit outside the stormy circle in which these two communed. In such moments as these she prayed for Lawson.
“I”—it was Girard who spoke at last—“my mother—Cater said once that he’d told you something about me.”