He shook his head, with a sudden gleam in his gray eyes. “No; there you’re wrong. I’d never make any woman care for me, because I’d never want to. If she couldn’t care for me without my _making_ her—! I’d have to know, when I first looked at her, that she was _mine_. And if she were not, if she did not care for me herself, I’d never want to make her—never!” “Oh, oh!” protested Lois again, with interested amusement, shattered the next instant as a fragile glass may be shattered by the blow of a hammer. The telephone-bell had rung, and Girard ran to it, closing the intervening door behind him. The curtain of anxiety, lifted for breathing-space for a moment, hung over them again somberly, like a pall. Where was Justin? The two women clinging together hung breathlessly on Girard’s movements; his low, murmuring voice told nothing. When he returned to where they stood, his face was impassive. “Nothing new; I’m just going to town for a couple of hours, that’s all.” “Oh, must you leave us?” “I’m coming back, if you’ll let me.” He bent over Lois with that earnest look which seemed somehow to insure protection. “I want you to let me stay down-stairs here all night, if you will; I’m going to make arrangements to get a special message through, no matter what time it comes, and I’ll sit here in the parlor and wait for it, so that you and Miss Linden can sleep.” “Oh, I’d be so glad to have you here! Redge has that croupy cough again. But you can’t sit up,” said Lois. “Why not? It’s luxury to stay awake in a comfortable chair with a lot of books around. I’ll be back in a couple of hours without fail.” A couple of hours! If he had said a couple of years, the words could have brought, it seemed, no deeper sense of desolation. Hardly had he gone, however, when the door-bell rang, and word was brought to Lois, who with Dosia had gone up-stairs, that it was Mr. Harker from the typometer office. The visitor, a tall, colorless, darkly sack-coated man, with a jaded necktie, had entered the little drawing-room with a decorously self-effacing step, and sat now on the edge of his chair, his body bent forward and his hat still held in one hand, with an effect of being entirely isolated from social relations and existing here solely at the behest of business. He rose as Lois came into the room, and handed her a small packet, in response to her greeting, before reseating himself. “Thank you very much,” said Lois. “This is the money, I suppose. I’m sorry you went to the trouble of bringing it out yourself, I thought you might send me a check.”