The evening was half over when she found herself in front of Mr. Girard, with some one hastily introducing them. He had just come from up-stairs with several men, all laughing and talking together interestedly, but he hardly had been in the room at all, and she had sensitively fancied that he had kept out of her way on purpose, though she remembered hearing Leverich say that he did not know how to dance, and so did not care for balls. Now, as she had looked at him coming through the crowd, his personality made itself felt, through her dull misery, as something unaffectedly charming and magnetic. He was tall, straight, and well made, with the square shoulders she remembered, and the easy, erect carriage of a soldier. The thick waves of his light-brown hair, his long, thin face with its large, well-shaped nose and resolute chin, all gave an impression of young vitality and power that accorded well with her thought of him. His eyes were light gray, and not very large; Dosia had seen them full of laughter a moment before, but they seemed to acquire a sudden baffling hardness now as they met hers. She had thought of him so long and intimately that his presence near her brought its exquisite suggestion of help and comfort. She looked up at him. It might help even her to be near anyone as strong as that, if he were kind—as kind as she knew he could be. Her heart was in her eyes, as ever, unconsciously, as she half extended her hand. Was it by accident that he did not see it? He bowed formally as he said: “Pardon me, but I am just on my way to the train.” He stepped aside, leaving a free passage for the youth who came pushing by to claim his dance with her, and was gone almost before she knew it. He _could_ have stayed—he did not want to talk to her! She was lonely and disgraced, and the thought of Lawson an agony. She did not see that, as Girard went into the hall, some one gripped him there and said fiercely, “Come with me!” Billy Snow, his eyes blazing, had pulled him out on the piazza beyond. “You’ve got to answer to me for that,” he stuttered. “You’ve got to answer to me for that, Mr. Girard. Why did you turn away from Do—from Miss Linden like that?” “What right have you to ask?” questioned the other man coolly, but with a sudden frown. “None, except that I—love her,” said Billy, with a queer, boyish catch in his voice. “Yes, I love her, and she doesn’t care a snap of her finger for me. But I don’t care; I love her anyway, and I always shall. I’m proud to!” The catch came again. “She may step on me, if she wants to. You saw what happened here to-night when that damned brute—” He made a gesture toward the hallway. Girard made no answer, but looked into vacancy for a moment. Before the sight of both of them came a vision of Dosia in all the radiance of her beautiful innocence, the flush on her cheek, and the divine, shy look in her eyes when she first raised them to Lawson, before it changed to——