Among all the social comings and goings at the Leverichs’, the excitement of Lawson’s presence held its place with Dosia. The sudden sight of his olive profile and his lithe figure, his cool, appraising gaze, his “Well, young lady?” with its ironic tone that yet conveyed a subtle kindness, his lazy, caressing expostulation, “Why not, when we are friends?”—these things made heart-beats that Dosia took pains to assure herself were of a purely Platonic nature, when she stopped at rare occasions to take tally of her emotions, though there was a continual unacknowledged inner protest, in spite of her yielding, which made her resolve each day to withdraw a little on the next. But they never talked of love; they talked only of goodness, or art, or music, or about the way you felt about different subjects, or little teasing things, like why she drew her mouth down at the corners when he looked at her, or why she had seemed to disapprove the night before. They were bound together by the hope of higher things. She met him always in the morning with the bright uplifting smile that said, “I know you will repay my confidence—for _I_ believe in you!” “I really wish Lawson would go away,” said Mrs. Leverich, one day, as the two sat over their afternoon tea together. “Why?” asked Dosia, with the suddenly concentrated composure his name always brought her outwardly. “I thought you said last week that he had improved so much.” “Oh, yes, he’s had one of his good streaks lately; and he _is_ a sweet fellow when he’s nice—he was the dearest _little_ boy! Lawson can twist me around his little finger when he wants to; he knows that he can get money out of me every time, even when he oughtn’t to have it. But he can’t keep up this sort of thing long, you know, he is so restless; there’s bound to be a breakdown afterwards. I dread it; the breakdowns get worse, now, every time.” “Perhaps there will be no breakdown, after all,” said Dosia, in an even voice, but with that sudden deep sensation of disenchantment which his sister’s words always brought to her, and which lay upon her spirit like a living thing, dragging her fancy in chains. It was not alone Mrs. Leverich’s words, either, that had this power; when anyone spoke of Lawson it brought the same displeasing uneasiness, followed by the wonted eager remorsefulness later, when she saw him. But through each phase one foundational sense held good—he was not at all the kind of man she would ever want to marry; the whole attraction of the situation was in the fact that one could be so nobly intimate, and still keep off the danger-ground. Once or twice he had seemed to be infringing on it, and then she had turned him aside with sweet solemnity and additional inner excitement.