her way to the Wheeler house. She
saw in what she was doing no particularly culpable thing. She had no
great revenge in mind; all that she intended was an evening of the score
between them. "He preferred you to me, when you knew I cared. But he has
deserted you." And perhaps, too, a small present jealousy, for she was
to live in the old brick Livingstone house, or in one like it, while all
the village expected ultimately to see Elizabeth installed in the house
on the hill.

She kept her message to the end of her visit, and delivered her blow
standing.

"I have something I ought to tell you, Elizabeth. But I don't know how
you'll take it."

"Maybe it's something I won't want to hear."

"I'll tell you, if you won't say where you heard it."

But Elizabeth made a small, impatient gesture. "I don't like secrets,
Clare. I can't keep them, for one thing. You'd better not tell me."

Clare was nearly balked of her revenge, but not entirely.

"All right," she said, and prepared to depart. "I won't. But you might
just find out from your friend Mrs. Sayre who it was she saw in Chicago
this week."

It was in this manner, bit by bit and each bit trivial, that the case
against Dick was built up for Elizabeth. Mrs. Sayre, helpless before her
quiet questioning, had to acknowledge one damning thing after another.
He had known her; he had not asked for Elizabeth, but only for David;
he looked tired and thin, but well. She stood at the window watching
Elizabeth go down the hill, with a feeling that she had just seen
something die before her.

XXXVIII

On the night Bassett and Harrison Miller were to return from Chicago
Lucy sat downstairs in her sitting-room waiting for news.

At ten o'clock, according to her custom, she went up to see that David
was comfortable for the night, and to read him that prayer for the
absent with which he always closed his day of waiting. But before she
went she stopped before the old mirror in the hall, to see if she wore
any visible sign of tension.

The door into Dick's office was open, and on his once neat desk there
lay a litter of papers and letters. She sighed and went up the stairs.

David lay propped up in his walnut bed. An incredibly wasted and old
David; the hands on the log-cabin quilt which their mother had made were
old hands, and tired. Sometimes Lucy, with a frightened gasp, would fear
that David's waiting now was not all for Dick. That he was waiting for
peace.

There h