As it happened, no one in the old house had seen Maggie Donaldson’s confession in the newspaper.  Lucy was saved that anxiety, at least.  Appearing, as it did, the morning after David’s stroke, it came in with the morning milk, lay about unnoticed, and passed out again, to start a fire or line a pantry shelf.  Harrison Miller, next door, read it over his coffee.  Walter Wheeler in the eight-thirty train glanced at it and glanced away.  Nina Ward read it in bed.  And that was all.

There came to the house a steady procession of inquirers and bearers of small tribute, flowers and jellies mostly, but other things also.  A table in David’s room held a steadily growing number of bedroom slippers, and Mrs. Morgan had been seen buying soles for still others.  David, propped up in his bed, would cheer a little at these votive offerings, and then relapse again into the heavy troubled silence that worried Dick and frightened Lucy Crosby.  Something had happened, she was sure.  Something connected with Dick.  She watched David when Dick was in the room, and she saw that his eyes followed the younger man with something very like terror.

And for the first time since he had walked into the house that night so long ago, followed by the tall young man for whose coming a letter had prepared her, she felt that David had withdrawn himself from her.  She went about her daily tasks a little hurt, and waited for him to choose his own time.  But, as the days went on, she saw that whatever this new thing might be, he meant to fight it out alone, and that the fighting it out alone was bad for him.  He improved very slowly.

She wondered, sometimes, if it was after all because of Dick’s growing interest in Elizabeth Wheeler.  She knew that he was seeing her daily, although he was too busy now for more than a hasty call.  She felt that she could even tell when he had seen her; he would come in, glowing and almost exalted, and, as if to make up for the moments stolen from David, would leap up the stairs two at a time and burst into the invalid’s room like a cheerful cyclone.  Wasn’t it possible that David had begun to feel as she did, that the girl was entitled to a clean slate before she pledged herself to Dick?  And the slate—­poor Dick!—­could never be cleaned.

Then, one day, David astonished them both.  He was propped up in his bed, and he had demanded a cigar, and been very gently but firmly refused.  He had been rather sulky about it, and Dick had been attempting to rally him into better humor when he said suddenly: 

“I’ve had time to think things over, Dick.  I haven’t been fair to you.  You’re thrown away here.  Besides—­” he hesitated.  Then:  “We might as well face it.  The day of the general practitioner has gone.”

“I don’t believe it,” Dick said stoutly.  “Maybe we are only signposts to point the way to the other fellows, but the world will always need signposts.”