Like to hear! The relief for the moment turned Lois faint. Yet, after Mrs. Snow went, the torturing questions began to repeat themselves again. Justin was alive—Justin was alive on Tuesday night. Was he alive now? And why had he gone to Chicago at all? Why had he sent her no word? The wall between them seemed only the more opaque. Every fear that imagination could devise seemed to center around this new fact.
She and Dosia went around, straightening up the little drawing-room, making it ready for Girard’s occupancy—pulling out a big chair for his use, and putting fresh books on the table. The maid had long ago gone to bed, and there was coffee to be made for him—he might get hungry in the night. When he came in at last, he brought all the brightness and courage of hope with him; he had wired to William, he had phoned to a dozen different places in Chicago.
“Oh, what should we do without you?” breathed Lois, her foot on the stairway.
“It doesn’t seem to me I’ve helped you very much so far, our one clue has been from Mrs. Snow. I want you to go to bed now, and to sleep, Mrs. Alexander; take all the rest you can. I’m here to do the watching. If there’s anything really to tell, I’ll call you, I promise faithfully. What is it, Miss Linden? Did you want to speak to me?”
“There was a message for you while you were gone,” said Dosia in a low tone.
His eyes assented. “Yes, I went there—to the place that they—but it wasn’t Alexander, I’m glad to say, though I was afraid when I went in——”
“I know,” said Dosia.
Another strange night had begun, with the master of the house away. Lois went to her room to lie down clothed, jumping up to come to the head of the stairs whenever the telephone-bell rang, and then going back again when she found that those who were consulting were asking for information instead of giving it, but by and by the messages ceased.
Suppose Justin never came back! She began to feel that he had been gone for years, and tried confusedly to plan out the future. There were the children—how should she support them? She must support them. It was hard to get work when you had a baby. If she hadn’t the baby—no one should take the baby from her! She clasped him to her for a moment in terror, as if she were being hunted, before she grew calm and began planning again. There was only a little money left—to-morrow they must still eat. She must make the money last.
Dosia, on the bed by Redge’s crib, went softly after a while into the other room, and saw that Lois at last slept, though she herself could not. Each time that she saw Girard he seemed more and more a stranger, so far removed was he from her dream of him; through all his softness, his gentleness, she felt the streak of hardness, if nobody else did—though Mr. Cater, she remembered now, had spoken of it too—that the fires of adversity had molded. Perhaps no man could have worked up from the cruel circumstances of his early days without that hardening streak to uphold him. She divined, with some surprising new power of divination, that in spite of all his strong, capable dealing with actualities and his magnetic drawing of men, for the inner conduct of his own life he was shyly dependent on odd, deeply held theory—theory that he had solitarily woven for himself. She felt impersonally sorry for him, as for a boy who must be disappointed, though he was nothing to her.