“That’s the reason,” David said stoutly.  “She would wait for you.  She’s that sort.  I’ve known her all her life.  She’s as steady as a rock.  But she’s been brought up to have a lot of things.  Walter Wheeler is well off.  You do as I want you to; pack your things and go to Baltimore.  Bring Reynolds down here to look after the work until I’m around again.”

But Dick evaded the direct issue thus opened and followed another line of thought.

“Of course you understand,” he observed, after a renewal of his restless pacing, “that I’ve got to tell her my situation first.  I don’t need to tell you that I funk doing it, but it’s got to be done.”

“Don’t be a fool,” David said querulously.  “You’ll set a lot of women cackling, and what they don’t know they’ll invent.  I know ’em.”

“Only herself and her family.”

“Why?”

“Because they have a right to know it.”

But when he saw David formulating a further protest he dropped the subject.

“I’ll not do it until we’ve gone into it together,” he promised.  “There’s plenty of time.  You settle down now and get ready for sleep.”

When the nurse came in at eleven o’clock she found Dick gone and David, very still, with his face to the wall.

It was the end of May before David began to move about his upper room.  The trees along the shaded streets had burst into full leaf by that time, and Mike was enjoying that gardener’s interval of paradise when flowers grow faster than the weeds among them.  Harrison Miller, having rolled his lawn through all of April, was heard abroad in the early mornings with the lawn mower or hoe in hand was to be seen behind his house in his vegetable patch.

Cars rolled through the streets, the rear seats laden with blossoming loot from the country lanes, and the Wheeler dog was again burying bones in the soft warm ground under the hedge.

Elizabeth Wheeler was very happy.  Her look of expectant waiting, once vague, had crystallized now into definite form.  She was waiting, timidly and shyly but with infinite content.  In time, everything would come.  And in the meantime there was to-day, and some time to-day a shabby car would stop at the door, and there would be five minutes, or ten.  And then Dick would have to hurry to work, or back to David.  After that, of course, to-day was over, but there would always be to-morrow.

Now and then, at choir practice or at service, she saw Clare Rossiter.  But Clare was very cool to her, and never on any account sought her, or spoke to her alone.  She was rather unhappy about Clare, when she remembered her.  Because it must be so terrible to care for a man who only said, when one spoke of Clare, “Oh, the tall blonde girl?”

Once or twice, too, she had found Clare’s eyes on her, and they were hostile eyes.  It was almost as though they said:  “I hate you because you know.  But don’t dare to pity me.”