"I see." He fell into profound thought, while she sat in her chair a
trifle annoyed with him. He was wondering how all this would affect him
and his prospects, and through them his right to marry. He had walked
into a good thing, and into a very considerable content.
"I see," he repeated, and got up. "I'll tell Miller, and we'll get to
work. We are all very grateful to you, Mrs. Sayre--"
As a result of that visit Harrison Miller and Bassett went that night to
Chicago. They left it to Doctor Reynolds' medical judgment whether David
should be told or not, and Reynolds himself did not know. In the end he
passed the shuttle the next evening to Clare Rossiter.
"Something's troubling you," she said. "You're not a bit like yourself,
old dear."
He looked at her. To him she was all that was fine and good and sane of
judgment.
"I've got something to settle," he said. "I was wondering while you were
singing, dear, whether you could help me out."
"When I sing you're supposed to listen. Well? What is it?" She perched
herself on the arm of his chair, and ran her fingers over his hair.
She was very fond of him, and she meant to be a good wife. If she
ever thought of Dick Livingstone now it was in connection with her own
reckless confession to Elizabeth. She had hated Elizabeth ever since.
"I'll take a hypothetical case. If you guess, you needn't say. Of course
it's a great secret."
She listened, nodding now and then. He used no names, and he said
nothing of any crime.
"The point is this," he finished. "Is it better to believe the man is
dead, or to know that he is alive, but has cut himself off?"
"There's no mistake about the recognition?"
"Somebody from the village saw him in Chicago within day or two, and
talked to him."
She had the whole picture in a moment. She knew that Mrs. Sayre had been
in Chicago, that she had seen Dick there and talked to him. She turned
the matter over in her mind, shrewdly calculating, planning her small
revenge on Elizabeth even as she talked.
"I'd wait," she advised him. "He may come back with them, and in that
case David will know soon enough. Or he may refuse to, and that would
kill him. He'd rather think him dead than that."
She slept quietly that night, and spent rather more time than usual in
dressing that morning. Then she took her way to the Wheeler house. She
saw in what she was doing no particularly culpable thing. She had no
great revenge in mind; all that she intended was an evening of the score
between them. "He preferred you to me, when you knew I cared. But he has
deserted you." And perhaps, too, a small present jealousy, for she was
to live in the old brick Livingstone house, or in one like it, while all
the village expected ultimately to see Elizabeth installed in the house
on the hill.