“You don’t deserve to be answered,” said Dosia. She went and hung over his chair caressingly for a moment before escaping from the room.
In spite of his recantation, the effect of having been offered to Mr. Girard remained the real situation—one of sudden and great intimacy. The thought of his coming to-night added to her happiness; it brought the deep pleasure inseparable from his name—it was as if something both calm and protecting had been added, like the comfortable presence of one who understood. He would sympathize, if he knew, with that high motive of duty which must uphold her, whether the glamour held or failed. He would know what it was to feel that you must be true.
As she went through the still unlighted upper hall, she came face to face with some one in an overcoat, a man who carried a valise.
“Lawson!” she whispered.
For one dreadful moment she saw him in that way she feared; shallow, insincere, unstable—was that all? Was there something indefinably odd, indefinably strange? Then she saw only the gaze that recalled everything—he loved her! That thrilling thought carried all before it; her pulses leaped to own him master, with a sudden lovely, trusting joy.
“No, no!” she whispered again, with falling eyelids, as he made a movement toward her. His lips touched her hair. “Not here! Some one is coming.”
“Later, then!” he murmured assentingly, with a gleaming eye, as she eluded him and ran down the corridor to her own room.
This was to be her ball, her ball! Her lover had come. Her dress lay on the bed, a white and airy thing; her white pearl-beaded slippers were below it on the floor. Every chair was piled high with dainty whiteness of some sort. Her dressing-table, with its candles and flowers, was like a shrine for her beauty. The mirror reflected her with loosened waves of hair and bare arms and feet, her bath-robe slipping from her shoulders. It reflected her again, fresh and gleaming, low-bodiced, short-skirted, and a-tiptoe in her pearly slippers; and again in filmy, trailing petticoats, and half-covered neck, sitting like a pictured marchioness of old in front of the dressing-table, in the shine of the candles, while Mrs. Leverich’s maid piled the fair hair high on her small head. And every few minutes there was a knock at the door, and a maid brought in a box of flowers, great, delicious bunches of red and pink and white roses, and sweet peas and lilies, and violets tied with yards of lustrous satin ribbon. Dosia held out her arms for them, the dear, fragrant, heavenly things, and hung over them, and buried her face in them, and kissed them, before she sent them down-stairs, with loving protest that she should have to be parted from them until she should follow. She had not so much as dreamed of this richness of flowers for her! It was because it was her ball, her ball! And her lover had come.
There was a noise of carriages driving up to the house—the intimate friends who came first. The musicians below were beginning to tune their instruments, and the twanging of the strings touched an intenser chord of exhilaration. The long-ago dance at the bazaar—was Dosia to have another to-night to which that would be but as a shadow? For this was her ball—her ball, and the dance would be with Lawson as her lover. Her feet kept time to some fairy measure of her own.