The fairy glamour was already gone for Dosia. The personal note which she had missed at first was everything, and she found it nowhere but in Lawson. If she could have poured out her thoughts and feelings to Lois,—“talked things over,” girl-fashion,—if Lois had been her friend and lover—But Lois had no room for her; Dosia had learned to feel all the bitterness of the alien. And she was shy with the pleasant but self-sufficient women whom she met socially, and who were so intimate with one another; Dosia merely sat on the edge of conversations, so to speak, and smiled. She could not learn this assured fluency. The very children were hedged in from her by restrictions. To give up those little incidental meetings with Lawson was to give up the one silver string on which hung happiness, and yet—and yet—Dosia felt the sting of Lois’ matter-of-fact contempt for him; it lowered him indescribably. All women look down upon a man who will allow himself to be despised. She had cherished an ideal of him as a man lonely, misunderstood, terribly handicapped by opinion, by his own nature even, and yet capable of good and noble things. She had thought—— “Dosia?” “Well?” “Will you shut your door? The light streams down here and keeps Reginald from going to sleep. He waked when you went up-stairs.” Dosia rose and closed the door noiselessly; she would have liked to shut it with a bang. It was a climax. There seemed to be nothing that she could do in this house that was right! Her attitude had ceased to be only that of an alien, it was that of an antagonist; but it was also that of a lonely and unguarded child. CHAPTER NINE The closed door did not keep out the sounds below. Dosia could hear Justin’s voice upraised toward his only son, and Lois’ pleading “_Please_, Justin!” “Be quiet, Lois; I’ll settle this. Go down-stairs.” “I want dinky orter.” The child’s voice was high. “You have just had a drink of water; lie still.” “Redge ’ants ’noder dinky orter.” “Do you hear me? Lie still.” “Let me take him, Justin; I’m sure he isn’t well. I——” Dosia could hear her step getting fainter in the distance, and could imagine the look from Justin that had commanded her obedience. There was a definite masculine authority about him before which, on those rare occasions when he chose to exert it, every woman-soul in the house bowed down with the curious submission inherited from barbaric ages. Only the son and heir rebelled openly, with a firmness caught from the same blood. It took a hard tussle to conquer Redge. The mother down-stairs, vibrating with sympathy for her child, could not understand Justin’s attitude, or why he was so much more severe with the boy than he had ever been with Zaidee.