For all his earlier hunger he ate very little, and
soon after he tiptoed up the stairs again to David’s
room. When he came down to the kitchen later
on he found her still there, at the table where he
had left her, her arms across it and her face buried
in them. On a chair was the suitcase she had
hastily packed for him, and a roll of bills lay on
the table.
“You must take it,” she insisted.
“It breaks my heart to think— Dick,
I have the feeling that I am seeing you for the last
time.” Then for fear she had hurt him she
forced a determined smile. “Don’t
pay any attention to me. David will tell you
that I have said, over and over, that I’d never
see you again. And here you are!”
He was going. He had said good-bye to David
and was going at once. She accepted it with a
stoicism born of many years of hail and farewell,
kissed him tenderly, let her hand linger for a moment
on the rough sleeve of his coat, and then let him
out by the kitchen door into the yard. But long
after he had gone she stood in the doorway, staring
out...
In the office Doctor Reynolds was finishing a long
and carefully written letter.
“I am not good at putting myself on paper, as
you know, dear heart. But this I do know.
I do not believe that real love dies. We may
bury it, so deep that it seems to be entirely dead,
but some day it sends up a shoot, and it either lives,
or the business of killing it has to be begun all
over again. So when we quarrel, I always know—”
The evening had shaken Dick profoundly. David’s
appearance and Lucy’s grief and premonition,
most of all the talk of Elizabeth, had depressed and
unnerved him. Even the possibility of his own
innocence was subordinated to an overwhelming yearning
for the old house and the old life.
Through a side window as he went toward the street
he could see Reynolds at his desk in the office, and
he was possessed by a fierce jealousy and resentment
at his presence there. The laboratory window
was dark, and he stood outside and looked at it.
He would have given his hope of immortality just then
to have been inside it once more, working over his
tubes and his cultures, his slides and microscope.
Even the memory of certain dearly-bought extravagances
in apparatus revived in him, and sent the blood to
his head in a wave of unreasoning anger and bitterness.
He had a wild desire to go in at the front door, confront
Reynolds in his smug complacency and drive him out;
to demand his place in the world and take it.
He could hardly tear himself away.
Under a street lamp he looked at his watch.
It was eleven o’clock, and he had a half hour
to spare before train-time. Following an impulse
he did not analyze he turned toward the Wheeler house.
Just so months ago had he turned in that direction,
but with this difference, that then he went with a
sort of hurried expectancy, and that now he loitered
on the way. Yet that it somehow drew him he
knew. Not with the yearning he had felt toward
the old brick house, but with the poignancy of a long
past happiness. He did not love, but he remembered.
