"A few nights ago, David, I asked you if you thought it would be right
for me to marry; if my situation justified it, and if to your knowledge
there was any other reason why I could not or should not. You said there
was not."
"There is no reason, of course. If she'll have you."
"I don't know that. I know that whether she will or not is a pretty
vital matter to me, David."
David nodded, silently.
"But now you want me to go away. To leave her. You're rather urgent
about it. And I feel-well I begin to think you have a reason for it."
David clenched his hands under the bed-clothing, but he returned Dick's
gaze steadily.
"She's a good girl," he said. "But she's entitled to more than you can
give her, the way things are."
"That is presupposing that she cares for me. I haven't an idea that
she does. That she may, in time--Then, that's the reason for this Johns
Hopkins thing, is it?"
"That's the reason," David said stoutly. "She would wait for you. She's
that sort. I've known her all her life. She's as steady as a rock. But
she's been brought up to have a lot of things. Walter Wheeler is well
off. You do as I want you to; pack your 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.