“He’s not a bit attractive,” Nina was saying.  “Quiet, and—­well, I don’t suppose he knows what he’s got on.”

Wallie was watching Elizabeth.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, with masculine fairness.  “He’s a good sort, and he’s pretty much of a man.”

He was quite sure that the look Elizabeth gave him was grateful.

He went soon after that, keeping up an appearance of gaiety to the end, and very careful to hope that Elizabeth would enjoy the play.

“She’s a wonder, they say,” he said from the doorway.  “Take two hankies along, for it’s got more tears than ‘East Lynne’ and ’The Old Homestead’ put together.”

He went out, holding himself very erect and looking very cheerful until he reached the corner.  There however he slumped, and it was a rather despondent young man who stood sometime later, on the center of the deserted bridge over the small river, and surveyed the water with moody eyes.

In the dusky living-room Nina was speaking her mind.

“You treat him like a dog,” she said.  “Oh, I know you’re civil to him, but if any man looked at me the way Wallie looks at you—­I don’t know, though,” she added, thoughtfully.  “It may be that that is why he is so keen.  It may be good tactics.  Most girls fall for him with a crash.”

But when she glanced at Elizabeth she saw that she had not heard.  Her eyes were fixed on something on the street beyond the window.  Nina looked out.  With a considerable rattle of loose joints and four extraordinarily worn tires the Livingstone car was going by.

IV

David did not sleep well that night.  He had not had his golf after all, for the Homer baby had sent out his advance notice early in the afternoon, and had himself arrived on Sunday evening, at the hour when Minnie was winding her clock and preparing to retire early for the Monday washing, and the Sayre butler was announcing dinner.  Dick had come in at ten o’clock weary and triumphant, to announce that Richard Livingstone Homer, sex male, color white, weight nine pounds, had been safely delivered into this vale of tears.

David lay in the great walnut bed which had been his mother’s, and read his prayer book by the light of his evening lamp.  He read the Evening Prayer and the Litany, and then at last he resorted to the thirty-nine articles, which usually had a soporific effect on him.  But it was no good.

He got up and took to pacing his room, a portly, solid old figure in striped pajamas and the pair of knitted bedroom slippers which were always Mrs. Morgan’s Christmas offering.  “To Doctor David, with love and a merry Xmas, from Angeline Morgan.”