"I don't want to go down-stairs again." Dosia began to shake violently. "If he were to come back——"
"Well, stay up here. Zaidee shall bring you your dinner," said Lois humoringly. "I must go down now; I hear Justin. Only, you'll have to promise me to be quiet, Dosia, and not begin going wild again the moment I'm out of the room."
"No, I'll be good," murmured Dosia submissively. "Oh, Lois, you're so kind to me! I love you so much!"
Her head ached so hard that it was easy to be quiet now. She could not eat the meal which Zaidee, assisted to the door by the maid, brought in to her. It seemed, oddly enough, like a reversion back to that first night of her arrival—oh, so long ago!—after tempest and disaster. Yet then the white, enhancing light of the future had shone down through everything, and now there was no future, only a murky past, and she a poor girl who had dropped so far out of the way of happiness that she could never get back to it, never be nice again. That hand that had once held hers so firmly, so steadily, that she could sleep secure with just the comfort of its remembered touch, the thought of it had become only pain, like everything else. Oh, back of all this shaming hurt with Lawson and George Sutton was another shame, that went deeper and deeper still. Since that visit of Bailey Girard's, she had known that he had thought of her as she had thought of him, with a knowledge that could not be controverted. It is astonishing that we, who feel ourselves to be so dependent on speech as a means of communication, have our intensest, our most revealing moments without it. He had thought of her as she had of him, and, with the thought of her in his heart, had been content easily that it should be no more.
Oh, if this stranger had been indeed the hero of her dreams,—lover, protector, dearest friend,—to have sought her mightily with the privilege and the prerogative of a man, so that she might have had no experience to live through but that white experience with him!
"Dosia! Open the door quickly."
It was the voice of Lois once more, with a strange note in it. She stood, hurried and breathless, under the gas she turned on as she held out a telegram—for the second time the transmitter of bad news from the South. The message read: "Your father is ill. Come at once."
XVIII
There are times and seasons which seem to be full of happenings, followed by long stretches that have only the character of transition from the former stage to something that is to come. Weeks and months fly by us; we do not realize that they are here before they are gone, there is so little to mark any day from its fellow. Yet we lay too much stress on the power of separate and peculiar events to shape the current of our lives, and do not take into account that drama which never ceases to be acted, which knows no pause nor interim, and which takes place within ourselves.
It was April once more before Dosia Linden came North again, after extending months, in no day of which had her stay seemed anything but temporary—a condition to be ended next week or the week after at farthest. Her father's illness turned out to be a lingering one, taking every last ounce of strength from his wife and his daughter; and after his death the little stepmother had collapsed for a while, with only Dosia to take the helm. Dosia had worked early and late, nursing, looking after the children, cooking, sewing, and later on, when sickness and death had taken nearly all the means of livelihood, trying to earn money for the immediate needs by teaching the scales to some of the temporary tribe at the hotel—an existence in which self was submerged in loving care for those who clung to her; and to cling to Dosia was always to receive from her. Sleep was the goal of the day, and too much of a luxury to have any of its precious moments wasted in wakeful dreaming; besides, there was nothing to dream about any more. As she crept into her low bed, she turned away from the moonlight, because there are times, when one is young, when moonlight is very hard to bear.