Now and then Dick and Elizabeth met on the street, and she bowed to him and went on.  At those times it seemed incredible that once he had held her in his arms, and that she had looked up at him with loving, faithful eyes.  He suffered so from those occasional meetings that he took to watching for her, so as to avoid her.  Sometimes he wished she would marry Wallace quickly, so he would be obliged to accept what now he knew he had not accepted at all.

He had occasional spells of violent anger at her, and of resentment, but they died when he checked up, one after the other, the inevitable series of events that had led to the catastrophe.  But it was all nonsense to say that love never died.  She had loved him, and there was never anything so dead as that love of hers.

He had been saved one thing, however; he had never seen her with Wallie Sayre.  Then, one day in the country while he trudged afoot to make one of his rare professional visits, they went past together in Wallie’s bright roadster.  The sheer shock of it sent him against a fence, staring after them with an anger that shook him.

Late in November Elizabeth went away for a visit, and it gave him a breathing spell.  But the strain was telling on him, and Bassett, stopping on his way to dinner at the Wheelers’, told him so bluntly.

“You look pretty rotten,” he said.  “It’s no time to go to pieces now, when you’ve put up your fight and won it.”

“I’m all right.  I haven’t been sleeping.  That’s all.”

“How about the business?  People coming to their senses?”

“Not very fast,” Dick admitted.  “Of course it’s a little soon.”

After dinner at the Wheelers’, when Walter Wheeler had gone to a vestry meeting, Bassett delivered himself to Margaret of a highly indignant harangue on the situation in general.

“That’s how I see it,” he finished.  “He’s done a fine thing.  A finer thing by a damned sight than I’d do, or any of this town.  He’s given up money enough to pay the national debt—­or nearly.  If he’d come back with it, as Judson Clark, they wouldn’t have cared a hang for the past.  They’d have licked his boots.  It makes me sick.”

He turned on her.

“You too, I think, Mrs. Wheeler.  I’m not attacking you on that score; it’s human nature.  But it’s the truth.”

“Perhaps.  I don’t know.”

“They’ll drive him to doing it yet.  He came back to make a place for himself again, like a man.  Not what he had, but what he was.  But they’ll drive him away, mark my words.”

Later on, but more gently, he introduced the subject of Elizabeth.

“You can’t get away from this, Mrs. Wheeler.  So long as she stands off, and you behind her, the town is going to take her side.  She doesn’t know it, but that’s how it stands.  It all hangs on her.  If he wasn’t the man he is, I’d say his salvation hangs on her.  I don’t mean she ought to take him back; it’s too late for that, if she’s engaged.  But a little friendliness and kindness wouldn’t do any harm.  You too.  Do you ever have him here?”