“I don’t know.”
“Is there anything else that you want to tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, yes, you do.” His voice had grown dangerously tender. “What is it?” He waited again, bending nearer. “Don’t you want me to leave you—is that it? Don’t you want me to leave you?”
“No,” whispered Dosia.
“Then I’ll stay!”
His arm slid exultingly around her waist, and his hand pressed her head down upon his shoulder, while she submitted passively, a thing of suffocating heart-beats and burning blushes, captive to she knew not what. “You oughtn’t to have said that, you know, for now I’ll never go. I’ll stay with you. Hush—keep still!” He held her firmly as some one spoke from the front, and he answered in a loud tone:
“Yes, Mrs. Malcolmson, it’s the right road. Swing the lantern a little further around, Billy. Yes, that’s the old white house; we turn there—it’s all right.”
He kept his attitude of attention for a few minutes, looking from under the cover of his umbrella at the huddled heaps and the umbrellas in front of him. Then Dosia felt that he was coming back to her. She tried desperately to rally her forces, to think if this was the man with whom she wanted to spend her life, her husband for all her days. Alas, she could not think! Some giant, unknown force had sapped her power of thought. She weakly took his two hands and tried to push his arm from around her waist and to raise her head from his shoulder. His arm did not move; her head sank back again. His lips were on hers—which no man had ever touched before,—and those lips now were Lawson’s.
“There was one girl kissed to-night,” announced Mrs. Snow, as she took off her numerous layers of shawls and worsted head-coverings in household conclave after her return from the Leverichs’.