He was at the dinner as well as Mr. Sutton. The sixth person was Ada Snow, with the well-bred composure which concealed her innate shyness, and in the white dotted swiss she had worn for ten years past, ever since she had graduated, in fact, and which still looked decently presentable. Dosia was gay and conversational, as she was expected to be, the party being hers; she had began to feel the daughter of luxury, if not of Mrs. Leverich, and accepted the honors with the easily accustomed grace that is born of admiration and security, conscious every moment through it all of that bond between herself and Lawson. He looked boyish and happy. Later, in a talk about skating, he offered to teach her to skate the next day if the ice held, and Mrs. Leverich, to whom Dosia looked, expecting her to invent some excuse, approved at once, and planned to send for skates the first thing in the morning. His quizzical eye seized unerringly on the signs of withdrawal in her, and brought the blush of compunction to her cheek, while Mr. Leverich jocosely deplored that he could not take the office of trainer instead. Mr. Sutton, who had sat by her at dinner, and hovered amorously over her in the way a girl detests in a man she does not care for, might have been mysteriously rebuffed by the suggestion of Lawson’s intimacy, for he devoted himself for the rest of the short evening to Ada Snow, who dropped into one of her statuesque angles on an ottoman, and talked to him in her low, trained voice with modestly confidential deference, until he left, quite early. His attention to Miss Snow had not kept him, however, from picking up Dosia’s handkerchief twice when she happened to drop it. Billy Snow created a diversion by coming in at half-past ten for his sister, and stating casually that he had seen the doctor’s carriage stopping at the Alexander house as he passed. “As you passed _now_?” cried Dosia, startled. “Are the children worse?” An unacknowledged compunction, which she had felt through all her pleasures, at leaving the sick household, sprang swiftly to the front. “Oh, I’m so afraid Redge and Zaidee are worse! I wish I could go there at once and see!” “If they only had a telephone,” began Mrs. Leverich, for the twentieth time. “I can send——” “Oh, if I could only go myself!” interrupted Dosia, looking utterly miserable in her sudden wild anxiety. “You could have the carriage—but James is asleep.” Mrs. Leverich looked almost as miserable as Dosia in her baffled hospitality. “But if you don’t mind walking——” “No—oh, no!” “Then Lawson can take you, of course. There are some wraps in the hall; I’ll pin your dress up, so that you won’t need to take the time to change it. _Must_ you go, Ada? Then you can all walk down together. Mr. Leverich would have offered to go with you himself, I know, Dosia,—wouldn’t you, Joseph?—if it were not for his cold. But Lawson can take you, of _course_!” CHAPTER ELEVEN