“She’s cared enough to engage herself to Wallace Sayre!”

After one astounded glance Dick laughed bitterly.

“That looks as though she cared!” he said.  He had gone very white.  After a time, as David sat silent and thoughtful, he said:  “After all, what right had I to expect anything else?  When you think that, a few days ago, I was actually shaken at the thought of seeing another woman, you can hardly blame her.”

“She waited a long time.”

Later Dick made what was a difficult confession under the circumstances.

“I know now—­I think I knew all along, but the other thing was like that craving for liquor I told you about—­I know now that she has always been the one woman.  You’ll understand that, perhaps, but she wouldn’t.  I would crawl on my knees to make her believe it, but it’s too late.  Everything’s too late,” he added.

Before the hour for the services he went in again and sat by Lucy’s bed, but she who had given him wise counsel so many times before lay in her majestic peace, surrounded by flowers and infinitely removed.  Yet she gave him something.  Something of her own peace.  Once more, as on the night she had stood at the kitchen door and watched him disappear in the darkness, there came the tug of the old familiar things, the home sense.  Not only David now, but the house.  The faded carpet on the stairs, the old self-rocker Lucy had loved, the creaking faucets in the bathroom, Mike and Minnie, the laboratory,—­united in their shabby strength, they were home to him.  They had come back, never to be lost again.  Home.

Then, little by little, they carried their claim further.  They were not only home.  They were the setting of a dream, long forgotten but now vivid in his mind, and a refuge from the dreary present.  That dream had seen Elizabeth enshrined among the old familiar things; the old house was to be a sanctuary for her and for him.  From it and from her in the dream he was to go out in the morning; to it and to her he was to come home at night, after he had done a man’s work.

The dream faded.  Before him rose her face of the morning, impassive and cool; her eyes, not hostile but indifferent.  She had taken herself out of his life, had turned her youth to youth, and forgotten him.  He understood and accepted it.  He saw himself as he must have looked to her, old and worn, scarred from the last months, infinitely changed.  And she was young.  Heavens, how young she was!...

Lucy was buried the next afternoon.  It was raining, and the quiet procession followed Dick and the others who carried her light body under grotesquely bobbing umbrellas.  Then he and David, and Minnie and Mike, went back to the house, quiet with that strange emptiness that follows a death, the unconscious listening for a voice that will not speak again, for a familiar footfall.  David had not gone upstairs.  He sat in Lucy’s sitting-room, in his old frock coat and black tie, with a knitted afghan across his knees.  His throat looked withered in his loose collar.  And there for the first time they discussed the future.