But she was never real to him, as the other woman
was real. And he knew that she was lost to him,
as David was lost. He could never go back to
either of them.
As time went on he reached the point of making practical
plans. He had lost his pocketbook somewhere,
probably during his wanderings afoot, and he had no
money. He knew that the obvious course was to
go to the nearest settlement and surrender himself
and he played with the thought, but even as he did
so he knew that he would not do it. Surrender
he would, eventually, but before he did that he would
satisfy a craving that was in some ways like his desire
for liquor that morning on the trail. A reckless,
mad, and irresistible impulse to see Beverly Lucas
again.
In August he started for the railroad, going on foot
and without money, his immediate destination the harvest
fields of some distant ranch, his object to earn his
train fare to New York.
The summer passed slowly. To David and Elizabeth
it was a long waiting, but with this difference, that
David was kept alive by hope, and that Elizabeth felt
sometimes that hope was killing her. To David
each day was a new day, and might hold Dick.
To Elizabeth, after a time, each day was but one more
of separation.
Doctor Reynolds had become a fixture in the old house,
but he was not like Dick. He was a heavy, silent
young man, shy of intruding into the family life and
already engrossed in a budding affair with the Rossiter
girl. David tolerated him, but with a sort of
smouldering jealousy increased by the fact that he
had introduced innovations David resented; had for
instance moved Dick’s desk nearer the window,
and instead of doing his own laboratory work had what
David considered a damnably lazy fashion of sending
his little tubes, carefully closed with cotton, to
a hospital in town.
David found the days very long and infinitely sad.
He wakened each morning to renewed hope, watched
for the postman from his upper window, and for Lucy’s
step on the stairs with the mail. His first glimpse
of her always told him the story. At the beginning
he had insisted on talking about Dick, but he saw that
it hurt her, and of late they had fallen into the habit
of long silences.
The determination to live on until that return which
he never ceased to expect only carried him so far,
however. He felt no incentive to activity.
There were times when he tried Lucy sorely, when she
felt that if he would only move about, go downstairs
and attend to his office practice, get out into the
sun and air, he would grow stronger. But there
were times, too, when she felt that only the will
to live was carrying him on.
