“I don’t want to go to Sicily,” said Bibbs.  “I want to stay right here.”

The doctor’s drowsiness disappeared for a moment, and he gave his patient a sharp glance.  “It’s a risk,” he said.  “I think we’ll find you’re so much better he’ll send you back to the shop pretty quick.  Something’s got hold of you lately; you’re not quite so lackadaisical as you used to be.  But I warn you:  I think the shop will knock you just as it did before, and perhaps even harder, Bibbs.”

He rose, shook himself, and rubbed his eyelids.  “Well, when we go over you this afternoon what are we going to say about it?”

“Tell him I’m ready,” said Bibbs, looking at the floor.

“Oh no,” Gurney laughed.  “Not quite yet; but you may be almost.  We’ll see.  Don’t forget I said to walk down.”

And when the examination was concluded, that afternoon, the doctor informed Bibbs that the result was much too satisfactory to be pleasing.  “Here’s a new ‘situation’ for a one-act farce,” he said, gloomily, to his next patient when Bibbs had gone.  “Doctor tells a man he’s well, and that’s his death sentence, likely.  Dam’ funny world!”

Bibbs decided to walk home, though Gurney had not instructed him upon this point.  In fact, Gurney seemed to have no more instructions on any point, so discouraging was the young man’s improvement.  It was a dingy afternoon, and the smoke was evident not only to Bibbs’s sight, but to his nostrils, though most of the pedestrians were so saturated with the smell they could no longer detect it.  Nearly all of them walked hurriedly, too intent upon their destinations to be more than half aware of the wayside; they wore the expressions of people under a vague yet constant strain.  They were all lightly powdered, inside and out, with fine dust and grit from the hard-paved streets, and they were unaware of that also.  They did not even notice that they saw the smoke, though the thickened air was like a shrouding mist.  And when Bibbs passed the new “Sheridan Apartments,” now almost completed, he observed that the marble of the vestibule was already streaky with soot, like his gloves, which were new.

That recalled to him the faint odor of gasolene in the coupe on the way from his brother’s funeral, and this incited a train of thought which continued till he reached the vicinity of his home.  His route was by a street parallel to that on which the New House fronted, and in his preoccupation he walked a block farther than he intended, so that, having crossed to his own street, he approached the New House from the north, and as he came to the corner of Mr. Vertrees’s lot Mr. Vertrees’s daughter emerged from the front door and walked thoughtfully down the path to the old picket gate.  She was unconscious of the approach of the pedestrian from the north, and did not see him until she had opened the gate and he was almost beside her.  Then she looked up, and as she saw him she started visibly.  And if this thing had happened to Robert Lamhorn, he would have had a thought far beyond the horizon of faint-hearted Bibbs’s thoughts.  Lamhorn, indeed, would have spoken his thought.  He would have said:  “You jumped because you were thinking of me!”