Their hands touched—for the first time since the night of disaster, the night of her trust and his protection. The next instant there was a crash—the fragments of the jug lay upon the kitchen floor, the water streaming over it in rivulets. “Dosia!” called the frightened voice of Lois from above. “Yes, I’m coming,” Dosia called back. “There’s nothing the matter!” She had run from the room without looking up at that figure beside her, snatching a glass of water automatically from the dining-table as she passed by it. Fast as her feet might carry her, they could not keep pace with her beating heart. When the telephone-bell rang a moment after, it was to confirm the tidings given before. Justin was in Chicago. [Illustration: _He came toward her with the pitcher_] CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Justin was in Chicago,—the fact was verified, and he would start for home on the morrow. There seemed to be no details, save the comforting one that Billy Snow was with him. After that first sharp immediate relief from suspense, Lois again felt its filminess settling down upon her, all the more clingingly each time, not to be fully dissipated, after all, until Justin’s bodily return. Girard had gone back very early to the Snows’ to breakfast. He talked to Lois by telephone, but he did not come to the house; while Dosia, wrapped in an outward abstraction that concealed a whirl within, went about her daily tasks, living over and over the scene of the night before. The shattering of the pitcher seemed to have shattered something else. Once he had felt, then, as she had done; once—so far away that night of disaster had gone, so long was it since she had held that protecting hand in her dreams, that the touch brought a strange resurrection of the spirit. She had an upwelling new sense of gratitude to him for something unexpressed, some quality which she passionately revered, and which other men had not always used toward her. “Oh, he’s _good_, he’s good!” she whispered to herself, with the tears blinding her, as she picked up Redge’s blocks from the floor. She felt Lawson’s kisses on her lips, her throat—that cross of shame that she held always close to her; George Sutton’s fat face thrust itself leeringly before her. How many girls have passages in their lives to which they look back with the shame that only purity and innocence can feel! Yet the sense of Girard’s presence before was as nothing to her sense of it now—it blotted out the world. She saw him sitting alone in the dining-room, with his head resting on his hand, the quiet attitude filled intensely with life; the turn of his head, the shape of his hand, were insistent things. She saw him standing in front of her, long-limbed, erect of mien. She saw—If she looked pale and inert, it was because that inner thought of her lived so hard that the body was worn out with it.