He stepped aside, leaving a free passage for the youth who came pushing by to claim his dance with her, and was gone almost before she knew it. He could have stayed—he did not want to talk to her! She was lonely and disgraced, and the thought of Lawson an agony.
She did not see that, as Girard went into the hall, some one gripped him there and said fiercely, “Come with me!” Billy Snow, his eyes blazing, had pulled him out on the piazza beyond.
“You’ve got to answer to me for that,” he stuttered. “You’ve got to answer to me for that, Mr. Girard. Why did you turn away from Do—from Miss Linden like that?”
“What right have you to ask?” questioned the other man coolly, but with a sudden frown.
“None, except that I—love her,” said Billy, with a queer, boyish catch in his voice. “Yes, I love her, and she doesn’t care a snap of her finger for me. But I don’t care; I love her anyway, and I always shall. I’m proud to!” The catch came again. “She may step on me, if she wants to. You saw what happened here to-night when that damned brute—” He made a gesture toward the hallway.
Girard made no answer, but looked into vacancy for a moment. Before the sight of both of them came a vision of Dosia in all the radiance of her beautiful innocence, the flush on her cheek, and the divine, shy look in her eyes when she first raised them to Lawson, before it changed to——
“You saw what happened here to-night,” said Billy, with renewed heat at the other’s silence. “I don’t care what he said, or what you think; she’s no more to blame than——”
The other stopped him with a quick, peremptory gesture.
“You mistake,” he said shortly. “You’re speaking to the wrong person. I saw nothing. I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t want to.”
“What!” cried William, staring.