“I think I’d better go,” she murmured uncertainly, loath to depart, yet with a glance toward Lois, who, with Justin now standing beside her, was plainly expectant of departure. Lois had had no dancing—yet she was young, too. But at that moment the music struck up again—there was a crash of chords, and then a strain, wildly sweet, to which Dosia found herself gliding into motion ere she was aware. She knew before she looked that Lawson Barr was at the piano. His intent face, bent upon the keys, seemed remote and sad.
The big room was nearly empty. One of the high windows had been opened for air, revealing the shining of the stars far up above in the bluish-black sky; below it a heap of tall white chrysanthemums stood massed to be taken away. There were barely a dozen couples on the polished floor. These had caught the white fire of a dance played as Dosia had never heard one played before; there was a wild swing to it that got into the blood and made the pulses leap in unison. The dancers flew by on swift and swifter feet, with paling cheeks and gleaming eyes. Dosia was dancing with Billy Snow, it was his arm around her on which she leaned, but to her intense imagining it was with Lawson Barr that she whirled, with closed eyes, on a rushing and delicious air that swept them past the tinkling shivers of icy falls into a white, white garden of moon-flowers, with the silver stars above. From the flowers to the stars she swung in that long, entrancing strain—from the flowers to the stars! From the stars—ah, whither went that flight of ecstasy—this endless, undulating, dreaming whirl? Down to the flowers again now—back to the stars; beyond, beyond—oh, whither?
A chord, sharp and strong, rent the music into silence. It brought Dosia to the earth, awake and trembling, with parted lips and panting breath. But her eyes had the wonder still in them, her face the whiteness of the flowers, as, with head thrown back, her bright loosened hair touching the blue of her gown, the trailing folds of which had slipped unnoticed from her hand, she walked across the floor with Billy. Her loveliness, as she smiled, brought a pang to the woman-soul of Lois, it was so plainly of the evanescent moment; she felt that it was filched from the future possession of some dearest lover, who could never know his loss.
“I hope I haven’t let you stay too long, Dosia,” she said practically, and Justin hurried her into her wraps, after she had given Billy the rose he asked for. Everybody was leaving at once in couples, laughing and chattering, with the lights turned out behind them as they went.
The last thing which Dosia saw as she left the hall with Justin and Lois was a side view of Lawson Barr going down the stone steps, carrying in his arms the child who had fallen asleep on one of the benches. The light head rested on his shoulder, and the long black-stockinged legs hung down over his arm. Beside him walked the mother, voluble in thanks, with the child’s cap in her hand.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mr. William Snow was at present in that preparatory stage of existence known locally as “going to Stevens’”; in other words, he was a daily attendant at the institute of that name, situate on the heights of Hoboken, in the State of New Jersey, and was destined to become one of that army of young electricians who, in point of numbers, threaten to over-run the earth. He wended his way to the college by train each morning as far as the terminus, from thence taking the convenient trolley. His arms were always full of books, from which he studied fitfully as he journeyed.
Mr. Snow was slim and tall, being, in fact, as his mother and sisters admiringly noted, six feet one, with long legs, narrow shoulders, and a small round face of such an open, infantile character that his mother often averred that it had changed in nothing since his babyhood, and that a frilled cap framing his chubby visage would produce the same effect as at that early stage. His name seemed to typify the purity of his nature, as seen through this countenance so fair and fresh, so blue-eyed and guileless, accentuated by the curls of light hair upon his round white forehead. Mrs. Snow was wont to discourse upon her William’s ingenuousness and his freedom from the usual faults of youth in a way that sometimes taxed the gravity of the listener, for, in point of fact, Billy was a young scapegrace whose existence ever since he was in short clothes had been devoted to mischief and levity as much as the limits of circumstance would allow. No one could tell how he had suffered from his mother’s exalted belief in him. She had forbidden him to play with naughty boys whose mischievous pranks he had himself instigated; she had accompanied him to school to point with tense indignation at the injuries he had received from stones thrown by playmates at whom he had had the first convincing “shy”; she had complained untiringly to parents by letter, by his sisters, and by interview, of indignities offered to the clothing and the person of her unoffending son. If Billy hadn’t been the whole-souled and genial boy that he was, he would have been made an outlaw and an object of derision among his kind, but it was an understood thing that, far from being responsible for his mother’s attitude, he writhed under it with an extorted obedience. A certain loyalty to his parent, and also the tongue-tied position of youth toward authority, made it impossible for him fully to state to her how far below her estimate of him he really was; he bore it, instead, with the meekness of an only son whose mother was a widow.
The fact that he was a born lover and had been intermittently experiencing the tender passion since the age of seven, she regarded only as an additional proof of his gentle disposition. She would have liked him to be always in the society of girls instead of those rude boys.
With added years Billy’s outward demeanor had changed in his daily journey toward education. He no longer had scrimmages in the train with school-fellows, in which books of tuition served as weapons of warfare; he no longer harried the brakeman or climbed outside on the ferry-boat, or was chided for outrageous noisiness by long-suffering commuters. But the happy expression of his countenance was usually such a fixture that its marked absence attracted the attention of his fellow-passengers one day in the latter part of January. His face was gloomy and averted; he would not talk. To cheerful questions as to what had disagreed with him, or whether he was “up against it again” at Stevens, his replies were unexpectedly brief, and evinced his desire to be let entirely alone. The change had, in truth, come over him since entering the car, and was caused by the sight of two figures in a seat ahead of him.