He brought himself up sharply. He had allowed his imagination to run

away with him. He had been depicting a flight and no one who knew David

could imagine him in flight.

Nevertheless he was conscious of a new uneasiness and anxiety. When

David recovered sufficiently he would go to Norada, as he had told

Elizabeth, and there he would find the Donaldsons, and clear up the

things that bothered him. After that-He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity. He remembered her

at the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious emotions, its

counterfeit drama. He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found her

on the verge of tears.

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"Just remember, they're only acting," he had said.

"Yes. But life does do things like that to people."

"Not often. The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life. You

and I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things because

we get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them."

"Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?"

"A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, on

the carpet."

"But that is tragedy, isn't it?"

He had had to acknowledge that it might be. But he had been quite

emphatic over the fact that most people didn't drop it.

After a long time he slept in his chair. The spring wind came in through

the opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book on

the stand.




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