He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger.  Not at her, however.  He was very gentle with her.

And here was a curious thing.  She had always felt that she knew when Dick was thinking of her.  All at once, and without any warning, there would come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of surrounding and encircling sense of protection.  Rather like what she had felt as a little girl when she had run home through the terrors of twilight, and closed the house door behind her.  She was in the warm and lighted house, safe and cared for.

That was completely gone.  It was as though the warm and lighted house of her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she was alone outside, cold and frightened.

She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her alone.  The small gaieties of the summer were on, dinners, dances and picnics, but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous.  She could not, however, avoid Mrs. Sayre.  She tried to, at first, but that lady’s insistence and her own apathy made it easier to accept than to refuse.  Then, after a time, she found the house rather a refuge.  She seldom saw Wallie, and she found her hostess tactful, kindly and uninquisitive.

“Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,” she would say.  Or they would loot the green houses and, going in the car to the cemetery, make of Jim’s grave a thing of beauty and remembrance.

Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to the day she had told him of her engagement.  Mother and son, she began to feel that only with them could she be herself.  For the village, her chin high as Nina had said.  At home, assumed cheerfulness.  Only at the house on the hill could she drop her pose.

She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison Miller.  What she wanted that word to be she did not know.  There were, of course, times when she had to face the possibility that Dick had deliberately cut himself off from her.  After all, there had never been any real reason why he should care for her.  She was not clever and not beautiful.  Perhaps he had been disappointed in her, and this was the thing they were concealing.  Perhaps he had gone back to Wyoming and had there found some one more worthy of im, some one who understood when he talked about the things he did in his laboratory, and did not just sit and listen with loving, rather bewildered eyes.

Then, one night at dinner, a telegram was brought in, and she knew it was the expected word.  She felt her mother’s eyes on her, and she sat very still with her hands clenched in her lap.  But her father did not read it at the table; he got up and went out, and some time later he came to the door.  The telegram was not in sight.

“That was from Harrison Miller,” he said.  “He has traced Dick to a hotel at Norada, but he had left the hotel, and he hasn’t got in touch with him yet.”