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.
Nothing further had developed, so far as they knew. The search had been
abandoned. Lucy was no longer so sure as she had been that the house was
under surveillance, against Dick's possible return. Often she lay in
her bed and faced the conviction that Dick was dead. She had never
understood the talk that at first had gone on about her, when Bassett
and Harrison Miller, and once or twice the psycho-analyst David had
consulted in town, had got together in David's bedroom. The mind was the
mind, and Dick was Dick. This thing about habit, over which David pored
at night when he should have been sleeping, or brought her in to listen
to, with an air of triumphant vindication, meant nothing to her.