For all his earlier hunger he ate very little, and soon after he tiptoed up the stairs again to David’s room.  When he came down to the kitchen later on he found her still there, at the table where he had left her, her arms across it and her face buried in them.  On a chair was the suitcase she had hastily packed for him, and a roll of bills lay on the table.

“You must take it,” she insisted.  “It breaks my heart to think—­ Dick, I have the feeling that I am seeing you for the last time.”  Then for fear she had hurt him she forced a determined smile.  “Don’t pay any attention to me.  David will tell you that I have said, over and over, that I’d never see you again.  And here you are!”

He was going.  He had said good-bye to David and was going at once.  She accepted it with a stoicism born of many years of hail and farewell, kissed him tenderly, let her hand linger for a moment on the rough sleeve of his coat, and then let him out by the kitchen door into the yard.  But long after he had gone she stood in the doorway, staring out...

In the office Doctor Reynolds was finishing a long and carefully written letter.

“I am not good at putting myself on paper, as you know, dear heart.  But this I do know.  I do not believe that real love dies.  We may bury it, so deep that it seems to be entirely dead, but some day it sends up a shoot, and it either lives, or the business of killing it has to be begun all over again.  So when we quarrel, I always know—­”

XXXIX

The evening had shaken Dick profoundly.  David’s appearance and Lucy’s grief and premonition, most of all the talk of Elizabeth, had depressed and unnerved him.  Even the possibility of his own innocence was subordinated to an overwhelming yearning for the old house and the old life.

Through a side window as he went toward the street he could see Reynolds at his desk in the office, and he was possessed by a fierce jealousy and resentment at his presence there.  The laboratory window was dark, and he stood outside and looked at it.  He would have given his hope of immortality just then to have been inside it once more, working over his tubes and his cultures, his slides and microscope.  Even the memory of certain dearly-bought extravagances in apparatus revived in him, and sent the blood to his head in a wave of unreasoning anger and bitterness.

He had a wild desire to go in at the front door, confront Reynolds in his smug complacency and drive him out; to demand his place in the world and take it.  He could hardly tear himself away.

Under a street lamp he looked at his watch.  It was eleven o’clock, and he had a half hour to spare before train-time.  Following an impulse he did not analyze he turned toward the Wheeler house.  Just so months ago had he turned in that direction, but with this difference, that then he went with a sort of hurried expectancy, and that now he loitered on the way.  Yet that it somehow drew him he knew.  Not with the yearning he had felt toward the old brick house, but with the poignancy of a long past happiness.  He did not love, but he remembered.