He even thought of Lois on his way, and stopped to buy her some flowers. It was the first time he had thought of her unconsciously for a week. While he was waiting for a car to pass before he crossed the street, his eye caught the headline on a paper a newsboy was holding out to him: GREAT CRASH CONEWAYS & CO. FAIL IN BOSTON XX "I don't think Justin looks very well," said Dosia that afternoon. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, with her arms spread out half-protectingly over Lois. The latter was only resting; she had been up and around the house now for three or four weeks, and, although she looked unusually fragile, seemed well, if not very strong. The baby, wrapped in a blue embroidered blanket, with only a round forehead and a small pink nose visible, was of that satisfactory variety entirely given to sleep. Zaidee and even Redge, adoring little sister and brother, had been allowed to hold him in their arms, so securely unstirring was their little burden. Lois, who had passionately rebelled against the prospect of additional motherhood, exhibited a not unusual phase of it now in as passionately adoring this second boy. He seemed peculiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual possession that communicated a new strength to her. Lois was changed. She had always been beautiful, as a matter of fact, but there was something withheld, mysterious, in her expression, as if she were taking counsel of some half-slumberous force within, as of one listening at a shell for the murmur of the ocean. Not only Lois, but everything else, seemed changed to Dosia, at the same time being also flatly, unchangeably natural. She had longed--oh, how she had longed!--to be back here. Even while loving and working in her so-called home, she had felt that this was her real home, although here her cruelest blows had fallen on her; even while bleeding with the wrench of parting from her own flesh and blood, she had felt that this was the real home, for here she had really lived; and it was the home of the nicer, more delicate instincts. After the crude housekeeping, the lack of comforts that made the simplest nursing a grinding struggle with circumstance, it was a blessed relief to get back to a sphere where minor details were all in order as a matter of course. The Alexanders, with their three children, kept only one maid now; but even that restriction did not prevent the unlimited flow of hot and cold water!