There was another uncomfortable silence. Then Walter Wheeler burst out: "Confound it, Dick, I'm sorry. I've fought your battles for months,
not here, but everywhere. But here's a battle I can't fight. She isn't
angry. You'll have to get her angle of it. I think it's something like
this. She had built you up into a sort of superman. And she's--well, I
suppose purity is the word. She's the essence of purity. Then, Leslie
told me this to-night, she learned from him that you were back with the
woman in the case, in New York."
And, as Dick made a gesture: "There's no use going to him. He was off the beaten track, and he knows
it. He took a chance, to tell her for her own good. He's fond of her. I
suppose that was the last straw."
He sat still, a troubled figure, middle-aged and unhandsome, and very
weary.
"It's a bad business, Dick," he said.
After a time Dick stirred.
"When I first began to remember," he said, "I wanted whisky. I would
have stolen it, if I couldn't have got it any other way. Then, when I
got it, I didn't want it. It sickened me. This other was the same sort
of thing. It's done with."
Wheeler nodded.
"I understand. But she wouldn't, Dick."
"No. I don't suppose she would."
He went away soon after that, back to the quiet house and to David.
Automatically he turned in at his office, but Reynolds was writing
there. He went slowly up the stairs.
Ann Sayre was frankly puzzled during the next few days. She had had a
week or so of serenity and anticipation, and although things were not
quite as she would have had them, Elizabeth too impassive and even
Wallie rather restrained in his happiness, she was satisfied. But Dick
Livingstone's return had somehow changed everything.
It had changed Wallie, too. He was suddenly a man, and not, she
suspected, a very happy man. He came back one day, for instance, to say
that he had taken a partnership in a brokerage office, and gave as his
reason that he was sick of "playing round." She rather thought it was to
take his mind off something.
A few days after the funeral she sent for Doctor Reynolds. "I caught
cold at the cemetery," she said, when he had arrived and was seated
opposite her in her boudoir. "I really did," she protested, as she
caught his eye. "I suppose everybody is sending for you, to have a
chance to talk."