At the sound of Dosia's light oncoming step opposite the door, he rose at once—however, laying the cigar on the table—and with a quick stride stood beside her. He seemed tall and unexpectedly dazzling as he confronted her; his deep-set gray eyes were very brilliant.
"What is the matter? Is Mrs. Alexander ill?"
"No—oh, no; the children have been restless, that is all," said Dosia, recovering, with annoyed self-possession, from a momentary shock, and feeling disagreeably conscious of looking tumbled and forlorn. "I came down to get a pitcher of water."
"Can't I get it in the dining-room for you?" he asked, with formal politeness.
"Thank you. The water isn't running in the butler's pantry; I have to go in the kitchen for it. If you would light the gas there for me——"
"Yes, certainly," he responded promptly, pushing the portières aside to make a passage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as of deep darkness of the night outside around everything.
A large white cat lying on a red-striped cushion on a chair by the chilly hearth stretched itself and blinked its yellow eyes toward the two intruders.
"Let me fill this," said Girard, taking the pitcher from her—a rather large, clumsy majolica article with a twisted vine for a handle—and carrying it over to the faucet. The intimacy of the hour and the scene emphasized the more the punctilious aloofness of this enforced companionship.
Dosia leaned back against the table, while he let the water run, that it might grow cold. It sounded in the silence as if it were falling on a drumhead. The moment—it was hardly more—seemed interminable to Dosia. The white cat, jumping up on the table, put its paws on her shoulders, and she leaned back very absently, and curved her throat sideways, that her cheek might touch him in recognition. Some inner thought claimed her, to the exclusion of the present; her eyes, looking dreamily before her, took on that expression that was indescribably gentle, intolerably sweet.