He pressed her arm close to him, as he held her hand and pulled the wraps around her, shifting the umbrella as the wind changed. One of the men in front lighted a lantern and held it out in the rain at arm’s length, to glimmer ahead in the pitchy darkness and show the road to the driver, who held the horses at a walk. The wagon lurched and tipped in mud-holes and unexpected ridges and depressions, running up once on the edge of a bank, while the couples on the floor of it screamed and laughed. There were muttered rolls of thunder in the distance. Rain in the night had always brought back the scene of the disaster to Dosia, but she only thought now that she could not think. All of her that lived was living at this moment here. “Why are you so silent?” he murmured headily, after an interval. “I don’t know.” “Is there anything else that you want to tell me?” “I don’t know.” “Oh, yes, you do.” His voice had grown dangerously tender. “What is it?” He waited again, bending nearer. “Don’t you want me to leave you—is that it? Don’t you want me to leave you?” “No,” whispered Dosia. “Then I’ll stay!” His arm slid exultingly around her waist, and his hand pressed her head down upon his shoulder, while she submitted passively, a thing of suffocating heart-beats and burning blushes, captive to she knew not what. “You oughtn’t to have said that, you know, for now I’ll never go. I’ll stay with you. Hush—keep still!” He held her firmly as some one spoke from the front, and he answered in a loud tone: “Yes, Mrs. Malcolmson, it’s the right road. Swing the lantern a little further around, Billy. Yes, that’s the old white house; we turn there—it’s all right.” He kept his attitude of attention for a few minutes, looking from under the cover of his umbrella at the huddled heaps and the umbrellas in front of him. Then Dosia felt that he was coming back to her. She tried desperately to rally her forces, to think if this was the man with whom she wanted to spend her life, her husband for all her days. Alas, she could not think! Some giant, unknown force had sapped her power of thought. She weakly took his two hands and tried to push his arm from around her waist and to raise her head from his shoulder. His arm did not move; her head sank back again. His lips were on hers—which no man had ever touched before,—and those lips now were Lawson’s. “There was _one_ girl kissed to-night,” announced Mrs. Snow, as she took off her numerous layers of shawls and worsted head-coverings in household conclave after her return from the Leverichs’.