Billy nodded. “All right, I’ll pay you up for that some day. Oh, Dosia, you may think I’m joking, but I’m not! There have been days and nights when I’ve done nothing but plan the things I was going to do and say to make you care for me—but they’re all gone the moment I lay eyes on you. I’ll talk of whatever you like afterwards, but I’ve got to say first,”—Billy’s voice, deep and manly and confident, had yet a little shake in it,—“that nobody is going to marry you but me, and don’t you forget it. I’m no kid any more.” Something in his tone gave his words emphasis. “I know how to look out for you better than anyone else does.” “Dear Billy,” said Dosia, touched, and resting her cheek momentarily against the rough sleeve of his coat, “it’s so good to have you back again.” “I’m no kid any more,” said William warningly. Lois, who had been longing intolerably all day for evening to come, so that she could be alone with her husband, sat in the drawing-room, trying to sew with nervous, trembling fingers, while her husband, looking frightfully tired, and Bailey Girard smoked and talked—of all things in the world!—of the relative merits of live bait or “spoon” bait in trolling, and afterwards went minutely into details of the manufacture of artificial lures for catching trout. Those waste “social” hours of non-interest, non-satisfaction, that must be lived through before one can get to the place just ahead of them—how long, how unbearably long, they can seem! Lois’ face twitched, as well as her fingers; Girard’s voice, lucidly expressionless, went on and on in reminiscent detail, and Justin, looking frightfully tired, but apparently deeply interested, remembered and remembered the day they caught this, and the way they landed that and, with exasperating monotony, drew diagrams corroboratingly with two fingers on the table beside him. She did not realize, as women do not, that to Justin this conversation, banal and irrelevant to any action of his present life or his present anxiety, was like coming up from under-depths to breathe at a necessary air-hole. After five days of torturing, unexplained absence, to talk of nothing but fishing, as if his life depended on it! Girard himself had wondered, but he accepted the position allotted to him as a matter of course. He had thought, from Justin’s manner to-day, that he was to know something of his affairs; but if Justin did not choose to confide in him, that was all right. Possibly the affairs were all right, too; they were none of his business, anyway. Suddenly a word in the fishing conversation caught the ears of the two who were sitting in the dining-room, in a momentary pause. “That was the kind Lawson Barr used when he went down on the Susquehanna. By the way, I hear that he’s dead.” Lawson! Dosia’s face changed as if a whip had flicked across it, and then trembled back into its normal quiet. William leaned a little nearer, his eyes curiously scanning her. “Hadn’t you heard before?” “No; what?”