Once he found Clare Rossiter there, and was aware of something electric in the air.  After a time he identified it.  Behind the Rossiter girl’s soft voice and sympathetic words, there was a veiled hostility.  She was watching Elizabeth, was overconscious of her.  And she was, for some reason, playing up to himself.  He thought he saw a faint look of relief on Elizabeth’s face when Clare at last rose to go.

“I’m on my way to see the man Dick Livingstone left in his place,” Clare said, adjusting her veil at the mirror.  “I’ve got a cold.  Isn’t it queer, the way the whole Livingstone connection is broken up?”

“Hardly queer.  And it’s only temporary.”

“Possibly.  But if you ask me, I don’t believe Dick will come back.  Mind, I don’t defend the town, but it doesn’t like to be fooled.  And he’s fooled it for years.  I know a lot of people who’d quit going to him.”  She turned to Wallie.

“He isn’t David’s nephew, you know.  The question is, who is he?  Of course I don’t say it, but a good many are saying that when a man takes a false identity he has something to hide.”

She gave them no chance to reply, but sauntered out with her sex-conscious, half-sensuous walk.  Outside the door her smile faded, and her face was hard and bitter.  She might forget Dick Livingstone, but never would she forgive herself for her confession to Elizabeth, nor Elizabeth for having heard it.

Wallie turned to Elizabeth when she had gone, slightly bewildered.

“What’s got into her?” he inquired.  And then, seeing Elizabeth’s white face, rather shrewdly:  “That was one for him and two for you, was it?”

“I don’t know.  Probably.”

“I wonder if you would look like that if any one attacked me!”

“No one attacks you, Wallie.”

“That’s not an answer.  You wouldn’t, would you?  It’s different, isn’t it?”

“Yes.  A little.”

He straightened, and looked past her, unseeing, at the wall.  “I guess I’ve known it for quite a while,” he said at last.  “I didn’t want to believe it, so I wouldn’t.  Are you engaged to him?”

“Yes.  It’s not to be known just yet, Wallie.”

“He’s a good fellow,” he said, after rather a long silence.  “Not that that makes it easier,” he added with a twisted smile.  Then, boyishly and unexpectedly he said, “Oh, my God!”

He sat down, and when the dog came and placed a head on his knee he patted it absently.  He wanted to go, but he had a queer feeling that when he went he went for good.

“I’ve cared for you for years,” he said.  “I’ve been a poor lot, but I’d have been a good bit worse, except for you.”

And again: 

“Only last night I made up my mind that if you’d have me, I’d make something out of myself.  I suppose a man’s pretty weak when he puts a responsibility like that on a girl.”

She yearned over him, rather.  She made little tentative overtures of friendship and affection.  But he scarcely seemed to hear them, wrapped as he was in the selfish absorption of his disappointment.  When she heard the postman outside and went to the door for the mail, she thought he had not noticed her going.  But when she returned he was watching her with jealous, almost tragic eyes.