ur things and go to Baltimore.
Bring Reynolds down here to look after the work until I'm around again."

But Dick evaded the direct issue thus opened and followed another line
of thought.

"Of course you understand," he observed, after a renewal of his restless
pacing, "that I've got to tell her my situation first. I don't need to
tell you that I funk doing it, but it's got to be done."

"Don't be a fool," David said querulously. "You'll set a lot of women
cackling, and what they don't know they'll invent. I know 'em."

"Only herself and her family."

"Why?"

"Because they have a right to know it."

But when he saw David formulating a further protest he dropped the
subject.

"I'll not do it until we've gone into it together," he promised.
"There's plenty of time. You settle down now and get ready for sleep."

When the nurse came in at eleven o'clock she found Dick gone and David,
very still, with his face to the wall.

It was the end of May before David began to move about his upper room.
The trees along the shaded streets had burst into full leaf by that
time, and Mike was enjoying that gardener's interval of paradise when
flowers grow faster than the weeds among them. Harrison Miller, having
rolled his lawn through all of April, was heard abroad in the early
mornings with the lawn mower or hoe in hand was to be seen behind his
house in his vegetable patch.

Cars rolled through the streets, the rear seats laden with blossoming
loot from the country lanes, and the Wheeler dog was again burying bones
in the soft warm ground under the hedge.

Elizabeth Wheeler was very happy. Her look of expectant waiting, once
vague, had crystallized now into definite form. She was waiting, timidly
and shyly but with infinite content. In time, everything would come.
And in the meantime there was to-day, and some time to-day a shabby car
would stop at the door, and there would be five minutes, or ten. And
then Dick would have to hurry to work, or back to David. After that, of
course, to-day was over, but there would always be to-morrow.

Now and then, at choir practice or at service, she saw Clare Rossiter.
But Clare was very cool to her, and never on any account sought her,
or spoke to her alone. She was rather unhappy about Clare, when she
remembered her. Because it must be so terrible to care for a man who
only said, when one spoke of Clare, "Oh, the tall blonde girl?"

Once or twice, too, she had found Clare's eyes on