But she was never real to him, as the other woman was real.  And he knew that she was lost to him, as David was lost.  He could never go back to either of them.

As time went on he reached the point of making practical plans.  He had lost his pocketbook somewhere, probably during his wanderings afoot, and he had no money.  He knew that the obvious course was to go to the nearest settlement and surrender himself and he played with the thought, but even as he did so he knew that he would not do it.  Surrender he would, eventually, but before he did that he would satisfy a craving that was in some ways like his desire for liquor that morning on the trail.  A reckless, mad, and irresistible impulse to see Beverly Lucas again.

In August he started for the railroad, going on foot and without money, his immediate destination the harvest fields of some distant ranch, his object to earn his train fare to New York.

XXXV

The summer passed slowly.  To David and Elizabeth it was a long waiting, but with this difference, that David was kept alive by hope, and that Elizabeth felt sometimes that hope was killing her.  To David each day was a new day, and might hold Dick.  To Elizabeth, after a time, each day was but one more of separation.

Doctor Reynolds had become a fixture in the old house, but he was not like Dick.  He was a heavy, silent young man, shy of intruding into the family life and already engrossed in a budding affair with the Rossiter girl.  David tolerated him, but with a sort of smouldering jealousy increased by the fact that he had introduced innovations David resented; had for instance moved Dick’s desk nearer the window, and instead of doing his own laboratory work had what David considered a damnably lazy fashion of sending his little tubes, carefully closed with cotton, to a hospital in town.

David found the days very long and infinitely sad.  He wakened each morning to renewed hope, watched for the postman from his upper window, and for Lucy’s step on the stairs with the mail.  His first glimpse of her always told him the story.  At the beginning he had insisted on talking about Dick, but he saw that it hurt her, and of late they had fallen into the habit of long silences.

The determination to live on until that return which he never ceased to expect only carried him so far, however.  He felt no incentive to activity.  There were times when he tried Lucy sorely, when she felt that if he would only move about, go downstairs and attend to his office practice, get out into the sun and air, he would grow stronger.  But there were times, too, when she felt that only the will to live was carrying him on.