“Is anything wrong?” he asked, in a tone which was fairly sepulchral.

“That’s what I want to know, Dick.”

Suddenly he found himself violently angry.  Not at her, of course.  At everything.

“Wrong?” he said, savagely.  “Yes.  Everything is wrong!”

Then he was angry!  She went rather pale.

“What have I done, Dick?”

As suddenly as he had been fierce he was abject and ashamed.  Startled, too.

“You?” he said.  “What have you done?  You’re the only thing that’s right in a wrong world.  You—­”

He checked himself, put down his bag—­he had just come in—­and closed the door into the hall.  Then he stood at a safe distance from her, and folded his arms in order to be able to keep his head -which shows how strange the English language is.

“Elizabeth,” he said gravely.  “I’ve been a self-centered fool.  I stayed away because I’ve been in trouble.  I’m still in trouble, for that matter.  But it hasn’t anything to do with you.  Not directly, anyhow.”

“Don’t you think it’s possible that I know what it is?”

“You do know.”

He was too absorbed to notice the new maturity in her face, the brooding maternity born of a profound passion.  To Elizabeth just then he was not a man, her man, daily deciding matters of life and death, but a worried boy, magnifying a trifle into importance.

“There is always gossip,” she said, “and the only thing one can do is to forget it at once.  You ought to be too big for that sort of thing.”

“But—­suppose it is true?”

“What difference would it make?”

He made a quick movement toward her.

“There may be more than that.  I don’t know, Elizabeth,” he said, his eyes on hers.  “I have always thought—­I can’t go to David now.”

He was moved to go on.  To tell her of his lost youth, of that strange trick by which his mind had shut off those hidden years.  But he could not.  He had a perfectly human fear of being abnormal in her eyes, precisely but greatly magnified the same instinct which had made him inspect his new tie in daylight for fear it was too brilliant.  But greater than that was his new fear that something neither happy nor right lay behind him under lock and key in his memory.

“I want you to know this, Dick,” she said.  “That nothing, no gossip or anything, can make any difference to me.  And I’ve been terribly hurt.  We’ve been such friends.  You—­I’ve been lying awake at night, worrying.”

That went to his heart first, and then to his head.  This might be all, all he was ever to have.  This hour, and this precious and tender child, so brave in her declaration, so simple and direct; all his world in that imitation mahogany chair.

“You’re all I’ve got,” he said.  “The one real thing in a world that’s going to smash.  I think I love you more than God.”

The same mood, of accepting what he had without question and of refusing to look ahead, actuated him for the next few days.  He was incredibly happy.