He looked around the church with what was almost a possessive eye. These
people were his friends. He knew them all, and they knew him. They had,
against his protest, put his name on the bronze tablet set in the wall
on the roll of honor. Small as it was, this was his world.
Half smiling, he glanced about. He did not realize that behind their
bows and greetings there was something new that day, something not so
much unkind as questioning.
Outside in the street he tucked his aunt, Mrs. Crosby, against the
spring wind, and waited at the wheel of the car while David entered with
the deliberation of a man accustomed to the sagging of his old side-bar
buggy under his weight. Long ago Dick had dropped the titular "uncle,"
and as David he now addressed him.
"You're going to play some golf this afternoon, David," he said firmly.
"Mike had me out this morning to look at your buggy springs."
David chuckled. He still stuck to his old horse, and to the ancient
vehicle which had been the signal of distress before so many doors for
forty years. "I can trust old Nettie," he would say. "She doesn't freeze
her radiator on cold nights, she doesn't skid, and if I drop asleep
she'll take me home and into my own barn, which is more than any
automobile would do."
"I'm going to sleep," he said comfortably. "Get Wallie Sayre--I see he's
back from some place again--or ask a nice girl. Ask Elizabeth Wheeler. I
don't think Lucy here expects to be the only woman in your life."
Dick stared into the windshield.
"I've been wondering about that, David," he said, "just how much
right--"
"Balderdash!" David snorted. "Don't get any fool notion in your head."
Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically and thinking.
Finally he drew a long breath.
"All right," he said, "how about that golf--you need exercise. You're
putting on weight, and you know it. And you smoke too much. It's either
less tobacco or more walking, and you ought to know it."
David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the rear seat: "Lucy, d'you know where my clubs are?"
"You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall. If you get three of them back
you're lucky." Mrs. Crosby's voice was faintly tart. Long ago she
had learned that her brother's belongings were his only by right of
purchase, and were by way of being community property. When, early
in her widowhood and her return to his home, she had found that her
protests resulted only in a sort of clandestine giving or lending, she
had exacted a promise from him. "I ask only one thing, David," she
had said. "Tell me where the things go. There wasn't a blanket for the
guest-room bed at the time of the Diocesan Convention."