“All right, Sweetness, you’re not going to lose me again,” said William encouragingly. “My, but you do knock the spots out of those Western girls. Can’t we go in the dining-room by ourselves? I want to ask you to marry me before we talk any more.”
“Yes, do,” said Dosia, dimpling.
It was sweet to be chaffed, to be heedlessly young once more, to take refuge from all disconcerting thoughts—and from the new embarrassment of Girard’s presence—with Billy in the corner of the other room, where she sat in a low chair, and he dragged up an ottoman close in front of her. Through the open window the scent of honeysuckle came in with the gloom.
“Oh, but you’ve grown pretty!” he said, his hands clasped over his knees, gazing at her. “That’s right, get pink—it makes you prettier. I like this slimpsy sort of dress you’ve got on; I like that black velvet around your throat; I—have you missed me much?”
“No,” said Dosia, with the old-time sparkle. “I’ve hardly thought of you at all. But I feel now as if I had.”
Billy nodded. “All right, I’ll pay you up for that some day. Oh, Dosia, you may think I’m joking, but I’m not! There have been days and nights when I’ve done nothing but plan the things I was going to do and say to make you care for me—but they’re all gone the moment I lay eyes on you. I’ll talk of whatever you like afterwards, but I’ve got to say first,”—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 anyone 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.”
“I’m no kid any more,” said William warningly.
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 bait or “spoon” bait in trolling, and afterwards went minutely into details of the manufacture of artificial lures for catching trout.
Those waste “social” hours of non-interest, non-satisfaction, that must be lived through before one can get to the place just ahead of them—how long, how unbearably long, they can seem! Lois’ face twitched, as well as her fingers; Girard’s voice, lucidly expressionless, went on and on in reminiscent detail, and Justin, looking frightfully tired, but apparently deeply interested, remembered and remembered the day they caught this, and the way they landed that and, with exasperating monotony, drew diagrams corroboratingly with two fingers on the table beside him. She did not realize, as women 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.