Yet, for a man who did not love, he was oddly angry at the sight of two young figures on the doorstep.  Their clear voices came to him across the quiet street, vibrant and full of youth.  It was the Sayre boy and Elizabeth.

He half stopped, and looked across.  They were quite oblivious of him, intent and self-absorbed.  As he had viewed Reynolds’ unconscious figure with jealous dislike, so he viewed Wallace Sayre.  Here, everywhere, his place was filled.  He was angry with an unreasoning, inexplicable anger, angry at Elizabeth, angry at the boy, and at himself.

He had but to cross the street and take his place there.  He could drive that beardless youngster away with a word.  The furious possessive jealousy of the male animal, which had nothing to do with love, made him stop and draw himself up as he stared across.

Then he smiled wryly and went on.  He could do it, but he did not want to.  He would never do it.  Let them live their lives, and let him live his.  But he knew that there, across the street, so near that he might have raised his voice and summoned her, he was leaving the best thing that had come into his life; the one fine and good thing, outside of David and Lucy.  That against its loss he had nothing but an infatuation that had ruined three lives already, and was not yet finished.

He stopped and, turning, looked back.  He saw the girl bend down and put a hand on Wallie Sayre’s shoulder, and the boy’s face upturned and looking into hers.  He shook himself and went on.  After all, that was best.  He felt no anger now.  She deserved better than to be used to help a man work out his salvation.  She deserved youth, and joyousness, and the forgetfulness that comes with time.  She was already forgetting.

He smiled again as he went on up the street, but his hands as he buttoned his overcoat were shaking.

It was shortly after that that he met the rector, Mr. Oglethorpe.  He passed him quickly, but he was conscious that the clergyman had stopped and was staring after him.  Half an hour later, sitting in the empty smoker of the train, he wondered if he had not missed something there.  Perhaps the church could have helped him, a good man’s simple belief in right and wrong.  He was wandering in a gray no-man’s land, without faith or compass.

David had given him the location of Bassett’s apartment house, and he found it quickly.  He was in a state of nervous irritability by that time, for the sense of being a fugitive was constantly stressed in the familiar streets by the danger of recognition.  It was in vain that he argued with himself that only the police were interested in his movements, and the casual roundsman not at all.  He found himself shying away from them like a nervous horse.

But if he expected any surprise from Bassett he was disappointed.  He greeted him as if he had seen him yesterday, and explained his lack of amazement in his first words.