He could never bring her at will, as
he could David, for instance. She only came clearly at night, while he
slept. Then the guard was down, and there crept into his dreams a small
figure, infinitely loving and tender; but as he roused from sleep she
changed gradually into Beverly. It was Beverly's arms he felt around his
neck. Nevertheless he held to Elizabeth more completely than he knew,
for the one thing that emerged from his misty recollection of her was
that she cared for him. In a world of hate and bitterness she cared.

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.

XXXV

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,