To Dick the last day or two had been nightmares of loneliness. He threw
caution to the winds and walked hour after hour, only to find that
the street crowds, people who had left a home or were going to one,
depressed him and emphasized his isolation. He had deliberately put
away from him the anchor that had been Elizabeth and had followed a
treacherous memory, and now he was adrift. He told himself that he did
not want much. Only peace, work and a place. But he had not one of them.
He was homesick for David, for Lucy, and, with a tightening of the
heart he admitted it, for Elizabeth. And he had no home. He thought of
Reynolds, bent over the desk in his office; he saw the quiet tree-shaded
streets of the town, and Reynolds, passing from house to house in the
little town, doing his work, usurping his place in the confidence and
friendship of the people; he saw the very children named for him asking:
"Who was I named for, mother?" He saw David and Lucy gone, and the
old house abandoned, or perhaps echoing to the laughter of Reynolds'
children.
He had moments when he wondered what would happen if he took Beverly at
her word. Suppose she made her confession, re-opened the thing, to fill
the papers with great headlines, "Judson Clark Not Guilty. A Strange
Story."
He saw himself going back to the curious glances of the town, never to
be to them the same as before. To face them and look them down, to hear
whispers behind his back, to feel himself watched and judged, on that
far past of his. Suppose even that it could be kept out of the papers;
Wilkins amiable and acquiescent, Beverly's confession hidden in the ruck
of legal documents; and he stealing back, to go on as best he could,
covering his absence with lies, and taking up his work again. But even
that uneasy road was closed to him. He saw David and Lucy stooping to
new and strange hypocrisies, watching with anxious old eyes the faces of
their neighbors, growing defiant and hard as time went on and suspicion
still followed him.
And there was Elizabeth.
He tried not to think of her, save as of some fine and tender thing he
had once brushed as he passed by. Even if she still cared for him, he
could, even less than David and Lucy, ask her to walk the uneasy road
with him. She was young. She would forget him and marry Wallace Sayre.
She would have luxury and gaiety, and the things that belong to youth.