“You’re going to play some golf this afternoon, David,” he said firmly.  “Mike had me out this morning to look at your buggy springs.”

David chuckled.  He still stuck to his old horse, and to the ancient vehicle which had been the signal of distress before so many doors for forty years.  “I can trust old Nettie,” he would say.  “She doesn’t freeze her radiator on cold nights, she doesn’t skid, and if I drop asleep she’ll take me home and into my own barn, which is more than any automobile would do.”

“I’m going to sleep,” he said comfortably.  “Get Wallie Sayre—­I see he’s back from some place again—­or ask a nice girl.  Ask Elizabeth Wheeler.  I don’t think Lucy here expects to be the only woman in your life.”

Dick stared into the windshield.

“I’ve been wondering about that, David,” he said, “just how much right—­”

“Balderdash!” David snorted.  “Don’t get any fool notion in your head.”

Followed a short silence with Dick driving automatically and thinking.  Finally he drew a long breath.

“All right,” he said, “how about that golf—­you need exercise.  You’re putting on weight, and you know it.  And you smoke too much.  It’s either less tobacco or more walking, and you ought to know it.”

David grunted, but he turned to Lucy Crosby, in the rear seat: 

“Lucy, d’you know where my clubs are?”

“You loaned them to Jim Wheeler last fall.  If you get three of them back you’re lucky.”  Mrs. Crosby’s voice was faintly tart.  Long ago she had learned that her brother’s belongings were his only by right of purchase, and were by way of being community property.  When, early in her widowhood and her return to his home, she had found that her protests resulted only in a sort of clandestine giving or lending, she had exacted a promise from him.  “I ask only one thing, David,” she had said.  “Tell me where the things go.  There wasn’t a blanket for the guest-room bed at the time of the Diocesan Convention.”

“I’ll run around to the Wheelers’ and get them,” Dick observed, in a carefully casual voice.  “I’ll see the Carter baby, too, David, and that clears the afternoon.  Any message?”

Lucy glanced at him, but David moved toward the house.

“Give Elizabeth a kiss for me,” he called over his shoulder, and went chuckling up the path.

II

Mrs. Crosby stood on the pavement, gazing after the car as it moved off.  She had not her brother’s simplicity nor his optimism.  Her married years had taken her away from the environment which had enabled him to live his busy, uncomplicated life; where, the only medical man in a growing community, he had learned to form his own sturdy decisions and then to abide by them.

Black and white, right and wrong, the proper course and the improper course—­he lived in a sort of two-dimensional ethical world.  But to Lucy Crosby, between black and white there was a gray no-man’s land of doubt and indecision; a half-way house of compromise, and sometimes David frightened her.  He was so sure.