“You mean that he hasn’t?”

“Look here, Mrs. Sayre.  You’ve confided in me, and I know it’s important to you.  I don’t know a thing.  I’m to stay on until the end of the week, and then he intends to take hold.  I’m in and out, see him at meals, and we’ve had a little desultory talk.  There is no trouble between the two families.  Mr. Wheeler comes and goes.  If you ask me, I think Livingstone has simply accepted the situation as he found it.”

“He isn’t going to explain anything?  He’ll have to, I think, if he expects to practise here.  There have been all sorts of stories.”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Sayre.”

“How is Doctor David?” she asked, after a pause.

“Better.  It wouldn’t surprise me now to see him mend rapidly.”

He met Elizabeth on his way down the hill, a strange, bright-eyed Elizabeth, carrying her head high and a bit too jauntily, and with a sort of hot defiance in her eyes.  He drove on, thoughtfully.  All this turmoil and trouble, anxiety and fear, and all that was left a crushed and tragic figure of a girl, and two men in an old house, preparing to fight that one of them might regain the place he had lost.

It would be a fight.  Reynolds saw the village already divided into two camps, a small militant minority, aligned with Dick and David, and a waiting, not particularly hostile but intensely curious majority, who would demand certain things before Dick’s reinstatement in their confidence.

Elizabeth Wheeler was an unconscious party to the division.  It was, in a way, her battle they were fighting.  And Elizabeth had gone over to the enemy.

Late that afternoon Ann Sayre had her first real talk with Wallie since Dick’s return.  She led him out onto the terrace, her shoulders militant and her head high, and faced him there.

“I can see you are not going to talk to me,” she said.  “So I’ll talk to you.  Has Dick Livingstone’s return made any change between Elizabeth and you?”

“No.”

“She’s just the same to you?  You must tell me, Wallace.  I’ve been building so much.”

She realized the change in him then more fully than ever for he faced her squarely and without evasion.

“There’s no change in her, mother, but I think you and I will both have to get used to this:  she’s not in love with me.  She doesn’t pretend to be.”

“Don’t tell me it’s still that man!”

“I don’t know.”  He took a turn or two about the terrace.  “I don’t think it is, mother.  I don’t think she cares for anybody, that way, certainly not for me.  And that’s the trouble.”  He faced her again.  “If marrying me isn’t going to make her happy, I won’t hold her to it.  You’ll have to support me in that, mother.  I’m a pretty weak sister sometimes.”

That appeal touched her as nothing had done for a long time.  “I’ll help all I can, if the need comes,” she said, and turned and went heavily into the house.