The summer passed slowly. To David and Elizabeth it was a long waiting,

but with this difference, that David was kept alive by hope, and that

Elizabeth felt sometimes that hope was killing her. To David each day

was a new day, and might hold Dick. To Elizabeth, after a time, each day

was but one more of separation.

Doctor Reynolds had become a fixture in the old house, but he was not

like Dick. He was a heavy, silent young man, shy of intruding into the

family life and already engrossed in a budding affair with the Rossiter

girl. David tolerated him, but with a sort of smouldering jealousy

increased by the fact that he had introduced innovations David resented;

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had for instance moved Dick's desk nearer the window, and instead of

doing his own laboratory work had what David considered a damnably lazy

fashion of sending his little tubes, carefully closed with cotton, to a

hospital in town.

David found the days very long and infinitely sad. He wakened each

morning to renewed hope, watched for the postman from his upper window,

and for Lucy's step on the stairs with the mail. His first glimpse

of her always told him the story. At the beginning he had insisted on

talking about Dick, but he saw that it hurt her, and of late they had

fallen into the habit of long silences.

The determination to live on until that return which he never ceased

to expect only carried him so far, however. He felt no incentive to

activity. There were times when he tried Lucy sorely, when she felt

that if he would only move about, go downstairs and attend to his office

practice, get out into the sun and air, he would grow stronger. But

there were times, too, when she felt that only the will to live was

carrying him on.

Nothing further had developed, so far as they knew. The search had been

abandoned. Lucy was no longer so sure as she had been that the house was

under surveillance, against Dick's possible return. Often she lay in

her bed and faced the conviction that Dick was dead. She had never

understood the talk that at first had gone on about her, when Bassett

and Harrison Miller, and once or twice the psycho-analyst David had

consulted in town, had got together in David's bedroom. The mind was the

mind, and Dick was Dick. This thing about habit, over which David pored

at night when he should have been sleeping, or brought her in to listen

to, with an air of triumphant vindication, meant nothing to her.




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