The evening had shaken Dick profoundly. David's appearance and Lucy's
grief and premonition, most of all the talk of Elizabeth, had depressed
and unnerved him. Even the possibility of his own innocence was
subordinated to an overwhelming yearning for the old house and the old
life.
Through a side window as he went toward the street he could see Reynolds
at his desk in the office, and he was possessed by a fierce jealousy and
resentment at his presence there. The laboratory window was dark, and
he stood outside and looked at it. He would have given his hope of
immortality just then to have been inside it once more, working over his
tubes and his cultures, his slides and microscope. Even the memory of
certain dearly-bought extravagances in apparatus revived in him,
and sent the blood to his head in a wave of unreasoning anger and
bitterness.
He had a wild desire to go in at the front door, confront Reynolds in
his smug complacency and drive him out; to demand his place in the world
and take it. He could hardly tear himself away.
Under a street lamp he looked at his watch. It was eleven o'clock, and
he had a half hour to spare before train-time. Following an impulse he
did not analyze he turned toward the Wheeler house. Just so months ago
had he turned in that direction, but with this difference, that then he
went with a sort of hurried expectancy, and that now he loitered on the
way. Yet that it somehow drew him he knew. Not with the yearning he had
felt toward the old brick house, but with the poignancy of a long past
happiness. He did not love, but he remembered.
Yet, for a man who did not love, he was oddly angry at the sight of two
young figures on the doorstep. Their clear voices came to him across
the quiet street, vibrant and full of youth. It was the Sayre boy and
Elizabeth.
He half stopped, and looked across. They were quite oblivious of him,
intent and self-absorbed. As he had viewed Reynolds' unconscious figure
with jealous dislike, so he viewed Wallace Sayre. Here, everywhere, his
place was filled. He was angry with an unreasoning, inexplicable anger,
angry at Elizabeth, angry at the boy, and at himself.
He had but to cross the street and take his place there. He could
drive that beardless youngster away with a word. The furious possessive
jealousy of the male animal, which had nothing to do with love, made him
stop and draw himself up as he stared across.
Then he smiled wryly and went on. He could do it, but he did not want
to. He would never do it. Let them live their lives, and let him live
his. But he knew that there, across the street, so near that he might
have raised his voice and summoned her, he was leaving the best thing
that had come into his life; the one fine and good thing, outside of
David and Lucy. That against its loss he had nothing but an infatuation
that had ruined three lives already, and was not yet finished.