Nothing further had developed, so far as they knew.  The search had been abandoned.  Lucy was no longer so sure as she had been that the house was under surveillance, against Dick’s possible return.  Often she lay in her bed and faced the conviction that Dick was dead.  She had never understood the talk that at first had gone on about her, when Bassett and Harrison Miller, and once or twice the psycho-analyst David had consulted in town, had got together in David’s bedroom.  The mind was the mind, and Dick was Dick.  This thing about habit, over which David pored at night when he should have been sleeping, or brought her in to listen to, with an air of triumphant vindication, meant nothing to her.

A man properly trained in right habits of thinking and of action could not think wrong and go wrong, David argued.  He even went further.  He said that love was a habit, and that love would bring Dick back to him.  That he could not forget them.

She believed that, of course, if he still lived.  But hadn’t Mr. Bassett, who seemed so curiously mixed in the affair, been out again to Norada without result?  No, it was all over, and she felt that it would be a comfort to know where he lay, and to bring him back to some well-loved and tended grave.

Elizabeth came often to see them.  She looked much the same as ever, although she was very slender and her smile rather strained, and she and David would have long talks together.  She always felt rather like an empty vessel when she went in, but David filled her with hope and sent her away cheered and visibly brighter to her long waiting.  She rather avoided Lucy, for Lucy’s fears lay in her face and were like a shadow over her spirit.  She came across her one day putting Dick’s clothing away in camphor, and the act took on an air of finality that almost crushed her.

So far they had kept from her Dick’s real identity, but certain things they had told her.  She knew that he had gone back, in some strange way, to the years before he came to Haverly, and that he had temporarily forgotten everything since.  But they had told her too, and seemed to believe themselves, that it was only temporary.

At first the thought had been more than she could bear.  But she had to live her life, and in such a way as to hide her fears.  Perhaps it was good for her, the necessity of putting up a bold front, to join the conspiracy that was to hold Dick’s place in the world against the hope of his return.  And she still went to the Sayre house, sure that there at least there would be no curious glances, no too casual questions.  She could not be sure of that even at home, for Nina was constantly conjecturing.

“I sometimes wonder-” Nina began one day, and stopped.

“Wonder what?”

“Oh, well, I suppose I might as well go on.  Do you ever think that if Dick had gone back, as they say he has, that there might be somebody else?”