He went about his work with his customary care and thoroughness, for long practice had made it possible for him to go on as though nothing had happened, to listen to querulous complaints and long lists of symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled prescriptions which were, so hopefully, to cure.  Not that Dick himself believed greatly in those empirical doses, but he considered that the expectation of relief was half the battle.  But that was the mind of him, which went about clothed in flesh, of course, and did its daily and nightly work, and put up a very fair imitation of Doctor Richard Livingstone.  But hidden away was a heart that behaved in a highly unprofessional manner, and sang and dreamed, and jumped at the sight of a certain small figure on the street, and generally played hob with systole and diastole, and the vagus and accelerator nerves.  Which are all any doctor really knows about the heart, until he falls in love.

He even began to wonder if he had read into the situation something that was not there, and in this his consciousness of David’s essential rectitude helped him.  David could not do a wrong thing, or an unworthy one.  He wished he were more like David.

The new humility extended to his love for Elizabeth.  Sometimes, in his room or shaving before the bathroom mirror, he wondered what she could see in him to care about.  He shaved twice a day now, and his face was so sore that he had to put cream on it at night, to his secret humiliation.  When he was dressed in the morning he found himself once or twice taking a final survey of the ensemble, and at those times he wished very earnestly that he had some outstanding quality of appearance that she might admire.

He refused to think.  He was content for a time simply to feel, to be supremely happy, to live each day as it came and not to look ahead.  And the old house seemed to brighten with him.  Never had Lucy’s window boxes been so bright, or Minnie’s bread so light; the sun poured into David’s sick room and turned the nurse so dazzling white in her uniform that David declared he was suffering from snow-blindness.

And David himself was improving rapidly.  With the passage of each day he felt more secure.  The reporter from the Times-Republican —­if he were really on the trail of Dick he would have come to see him, would have told him the story.  No.  That bridge was safely crossed.  And Dick was happy.  David, lying in his bed, would listen and smile faintly when Dick came whistling into the house or leaped up the stairs two at a time; when he sang in his shower, or tormented the nurse with high-spirited nonsense.  The boy was very happy.  He would marry Elizabeth Wheeler, and things would be as they should be; there would be the fullness of life, young voices in the house, toys on the lawn.  He himself would pass on, in the fullness of time, but Dick—­

On Decoration Day they got him out of bed, making a great ceremony of it, and when he was settled by the window in his big chair with a blanket over his knees, Dick came in with a great box.  Unwrapping it he disclosed a mass of paper and a small box, and within that still another.