And, as Dick made a gesture: 

“There’s no use going to him.  He was off the beaten track, and he knows it.  He took a chance, to tell her for her own good.  He’s fond of her.  I suppose that was the last straw.”

He sat still, a troubled figure, middle-aged and unhandsome, and very weary.

“It’s a bad business, Dick,” he said.

After a time Dick stirred.

“When I first began to remember,” he said, “I wanted whisky.  I would have stolen it, if I couldn’t have got it any other way.  Then, when I got it, I didn’t want it.  It sickened me.  This other was the same sort of thing.  It’s done with.”

Wheeler nodded.

“I understand.  But she wouldn’t, Dick.”

“No.  I don’t suppose she would.”

He went away soon after that, back to the quiet house and to David.  Automatically he turned in at his office, but Reynolds was writing there.  He went slowly up the stairs.

Ann Sayre was frankly puzzled during the next few days.  She had had a week or so of serenity and anticipation, and although things were not quite as she would have had them, Elizabeth too impassive and even Wallie rather restrained in his happiness, she was satisfied.  But Dick Livingstone’s return had somehow changed everything.

It had changed Wallie, too.  He was suddenly a man, and not, she suspected, a very happy man.  He came back one day, for instance, to say that he had taken a partnership in a brokerage office, and gave as his reason that he was sick of “playing round.”  She rather thought it was to take his mind off something.

A few days after the funeral she sent for Doctor Reynolds.  “I caught cold at the cemetery,” she said, when he had arrived and was seated opposite her in her boudoir.  “I really did,” she protested, as she caught his eye.  “I suppose everybody is sending for you, to have a chance to talk.”

“Just about.”

“You can’t blame us.  Particularly, you can’t blame me.  I’ve got to know something, doctor.  Is he going to stay?”

“I think so.  Yes.”

“Isn’t he going to explain anything?  He can’t expect just to walk back into his practise after all these months, and the talk that’s been going on, and do nothing about it.”

“I don’t see what his going away has to do with it.  He’s a good doctor, and a hard worker.  When I’m gone—­”

“You’re going, are you?”

“Yes.  I may live here, and have an office in the city.  I don’t care for general practise; there’s no future in it.  I may take a special course in nose and throat.”

But she was not interested in his plans.

“I want to know something, and only you can tell me.  I’m not curious like the rest; I think I have a right to know.  Has he seen Elizabeth Wheeler yet?  Talked to her, I mean?”

“I don’t know.  I’m inclined to think not,” he added cautiously.