“I have already met Mr. Girard,” said Dosia, turning very white, but speaking in a clear voice. This time it was she who did not see the half-extended hand, which immediately dropped to his side, though he bowed with politely murmured assent. Stepping back to a chair half across the room, he seated himself by Justin. A wave of resentment, greater than anything that she had ever felt before, had surged over Dosia at the sight of him, as his eyes, with a sort of quick, veiled questioning in them, had for an instant met hers—resentment as for some deep, irremediable wrong. Her cheeks and lips grew scarlet with the proudly surging blood, she held her head high, while Mr. Sutton looked at her as if bewitched—though he turned from her a moment to say: “Weren’t you up on the Sunset Drive this afternoon, Girard?” “Yes; I thought you didn’t see me,” said the other lightly, himself turning to respond to a question of Justin’s, which left the other group out of the conversation, an exclusion of which George availed himself with ardor. [Illustration: _Mr. Sutton leaned over Dosia with eyes for nobody else_] There is an atmosphere in the presence of those who have lived through large experiences which is hard to describe. As Girard sat there talking to Justin in courteous ease, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his chin leaning on the fingers of his hand, he had a distinction possessed by no one else in the room. Even Justin, with all his engaging personality, seemed somehow a little narrow, a little provincial, by the side of Girard. Lois, who had been going backward and forward from the dining-room,—with black-eyed Redge, sturdy and turbulent, following after her astride a stick, until the nurse was called to take him away,—came and sat down quite naturally beside this new visitor as if he had been an old friend, and was evidently interested and pleased. As a matter of fact, though all women as a rule liked Girard at sight, he much preferred the society of those who were married, when he went in women’s society at all. Girls gave him a strange inner feeling of shyness, of deficiency—perhaps partly caused by the conscious disadvantages of a youth other than that to which he had been born, but it was a feeling with which he would have been the last to be credited, and which he certainly need have been the last to possess. Like many very attractive people, he had no satisfying sense of attractiveness himself. It was raining now, but very softly, after all the wild preparation, with a hint of sunshine through the rain that sent a pale-green light over the little drawing-room, with its spindle-legged furniture and the water-colors on its walls, though the gloom of the dining-room beyond was relieved only by the silver and the white napkins on the round mahogany table with a glass bowl of green-stemmed, white-belled lilies-of-the-valley in the center.