“That’s different,” he retorted, and retired into gloomy silence behind his newspaper.  Drat these women anyhow.  It was like some fool female to come there and rake up some old and defunct scandal.  He’d stand up for Dick, if it ever came to a show-down.  He liked Dick.  What the devil did his mother matter, anyhow?  If this town hadn’t had enough evidence of Dick Livingstone’s quality the last few years he’d better go elsewhere.  He—­

He got up and whistled for the dog.

“I’m going to take a walk,” he said briefly, and went out.  He always took a walk when things disturbed him.

On the Sunday afternoon after Dick had gone Elizabeth was alone in her room upstairs.  On the bed lay the sort of gown Nina would have called a dinner dress, and to which Elizabeth referred as her dark blue.  Seen thus, in the room which was her own expression, there was a certain nobility about her very simplicity, a steadiness about her eyes that was almost disconcerting.

“She’s the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some man,” Nina had said once, rather flippantly, “and never know she was shipwrecked.  No man in the world could do that to me.”

But just then Elizabeth looked totally unlike shipwreck.  Nothing seemed more like a safe harbor than the Wheeler house that afternoon, or all the afternoons.  Life went on, the comfortable life of an upper middle-class household.  Candles and flowers on the table and a neat waitress to serve; little carefully planned shopping expeditions; fine hand-sewing on dainty undergarments for rainy days; small tributes of books and candy; invitations and consultations as to what to wear; choir practice, a class in the Sunday school, a little work among the poor; the volcano which had been Nina overflowing elsewhere in a smart little house with a butler out on the Ridgely Road.

She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady—­and serene; not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized dreams and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without knowing that she was waiting.

Sometimes she worried.  She thought she ought to “do something.”  A good many of the girls she knew wanted to do something, but they were vague as to what.  She felt at those times that she was not being very useful, and she had gone so far as to lay the matter before her father a couple of years before, when she was just eighteen.

“Just what do you think of doing?” he had inquired.

“That’s it,” she had said despondently.  “I don’t know.  I haven’t any particular talent, you know.  But I don’t think I ought to go on having you support me in idleness all my life.”

“Well, I don’t think it likely that I’ll have to,” he had observed, dryly.  “But here’s the point, and I think it’s important.  I don’t intend to work without some compensation, and my family is my compensation.  You just hang around and make me happy, as you do, and you’re fulfilling your economic place in the nation.  Don’t you forget it, either.”