Nor were David’s motives selfish or unworthy.  His patients were his friends.  He had a sense of responsibility to them, and very little faith in the new modern methods.  He thought there was a great deal of tomfoolery about them, and he viewed the gradual loss of faith in drugs with alarm.  When Dick wore rubber gloves during their first obstetric case together he snorted.

“I’ve delivered about half the population of this town,” he said, “and slapped ’em to make ’em breathe with my own bare hands.  And I’m still here and so are they.”

For by that time Dick had made his decision.  He could not abandon David.  For him then and hereafter the routine of a general practice in a suburban town, the long hours, the varied responsibilities, the feeling he had sometimes that by doing many things passably he was doing none of them well.  But for compensation he had old David’s content and greater leisure, and Lucy Crosby’s gratitude and love.

Now and then he chafed a little when he read some article in a medical journal by one of his fellow enthusiasts, or when, in France, he saw men younger than himself obtaining an experience in their several specialties that would enable them to reach wide fields at home.  But mostly he was content, or at least resigned.  He was building up the Livingstone practice, and his one anxiety was lest the time should come when more patients asked for Doctor Dick than for Doctor David.  He did not want David hurt.

After ten years the strangeness of his situation had ceased to be strange.  Always he meant some time to go back to Norada, and there to clear up certain things, but it was a long journey, and he had very little time.  And, as the years went on, the past seemed unimportant compared with the present.  He gave little thought to the future.

Then, suddenly, his entire attention became focused on the future.

Just when he had fallen in love with Elizabeth Wheeler he did not know.  He had gone away to the war, leaving her a little girl, apparently, and he had come back to find her, a woman.  He did not even know he was in love, at first.  It was when, one day, he found himself driving past the Wheeler house without occasion that he began to grow uneasy.

The future at once became extraordinarily important and so also, but somewhat less vitally, the past.  Had he the right to marry, if he could make her care for him?

He sat in his chair by the window the night after the Homer baby’s arrival, and faced his situation.  Marriage meant many things.  It meant love and companionship, but it also meant, should mean, children.  Had he the right to go ahead and live his life fully and happily?  Was there any chance that, out of the years behind him, there would come some forgotten thing, some taint or incident, to spoil the carefully woven fabric of his life?

Not his life.  Hers.