The Breaking Point - Page 61/275

The week that followed was an anxious one. David's physical condition

slowly improved. The slight thickness was gone from his speech, and he

sipped resignedly at the broths Lucy or the nurse brought at regular

intervals. Over the entire house there hung all day the odor of stewing

chicken or of beef tea in the making, and above the doorbell was a white

card which said: "Don't ring. Walk in."

As it happened, no one in the old house had seen Maggie Donaldson's

confession in the newspaper. Lucy was saved that anxiety, at least.

Appearing, as it did, the morning after David's stroke, it came in with

the morning milk, lay about unnoticed, and passed out again, to start

a fire or line a pantry shelf. Harrison Miller, next door, read it over

his coffee. Walter Wheeler in the eight-thirty train glanced at it and

glanced away. Nina Ward read it in bed. And that was all.

There came to the house a steady procession of inquirers and bearers

of small tribute, flowers and jellies mostly, but other things also.

A table in David's room held a steadily growing number of bedroom

slippers, and Mrs. Morgan had been seen buying soles for still others.

David, propped up in his bed, would cheer a little at these votive

offerings, and then relapse again into the heavy troubled silence that

worried Dick and frightened Lucy Crosby. Something had happened, she was

sure. Something connected with Dick. She watched David when Dick was

in the room, and she saw that his eyes followed the younger man with

something very like terror.

And for the first time since he had walked into the house that night so

long ago, followed by the tall young man for whose coming a letter had

prepared her, she felt that David had withdrawn himself from her. She

went about her daily tasks a little hurt, and waited for him to choose

his own time. But, as the days went on, she saw that whatever this new

thing might be, he meant to fight it out alone, and that the fighting it

out alone was bad for him. He improved very slowly.

She wondered, sometimes, if it was after all because of Dick's growing

interest in Elizabeth Wheeler. She knew that he was seeing her daily,

although he was too busy now for more than a hasty call. She felt that

she could even tell when he had seen her; he would come in, glowing and

almost exalted, and, as if to make up for the moments stolen from David,

would leap up the stairs two at a time and burst into the invalid's room

like a cheerful cyclone. Wasn't it possible that David had begun to

feel as she did, that the girl was entitled to a clean slate before

she pledged herself to Dick? And the slate--poor Dick!--could never be

cleaned.