evading the real issue, David, aren't you?”
“Perhaps I am,” he admitted. “I'd better talk to him. I think he's got an idea he shouldn't marry. That's nonsense.”
“I don't mean that, exactly,” Lucy persisted. “I mean, won't he want a good many things cleared up before he marries? Isn't he likely to want to go back to Norada?”
Some of the ruddy color left David's face. He stood still, staring at her and silent.
“You know he meant to go three years ago, but the war came, and—”
Her voice trailed off. She could not even now easily recall those days when Dick was drilling on the golf links, and that later period of separation.
“If he does go back—”
“Donaldson is dead,” David broke in, almost roughly.
“Maggie Donaldson is still living.”
“What if she is? She's loyal to the core, in the first place. In the second, she's criminally liable. As liable as I am.”
“There is one thing, David, I ought to know. What has become of the Carlysle girl?”
“She left the stage. There was a sort of general conviction she was implicated and—I don't know, Lucy. Sometimes I think she was.” He sighed. “I read something about her coming back, some months ago, in 'The Valley.' That was the thing she was playing the spring before it happened.” He turned on her. “Don't get that in your head with the rest.”
“I wonder, sometimes.”
“I know it.”
Outside the slamming of an automobile door announced Dick's return, and almost immediately Minnie rang the old fashioned gong which hung in the lower hall. Mrs. Crosby got up and placed a leaf of lettuce between the bars of the bird cage.
“Dinner time, Caruso,” she said absently. Caruso was the name Dick had given the bird. And to David: “She must be in her thirties now.”
“Probably.” Then his anger and anxiety burst out. “What difference can it make about her? About Donaldson's wife? About any hang-over from that rotten time? They're gone, all of them. He's here. He's safe and happy. He's strong and fine. That's gone.”
In the lower hall Dick was taking off his overcoat.
“Smell's like chicken, Minnie,” he said, into the dining room.
“Chicken and biscuits, Mr. Dick.”
“Hi, up there!” he called lustily. “Come and feed a starving man. I'm going to muffle the door-bell!”
He stood smiling up at them, very tidy in his Sunday suit, very boyish, for all his thirty-two years. His face, smilingly tender as he watched them, was strong rather than handsome, quietly dependable and faintly humorous.
“In the language of our great ally,” he said, “Madame et Monsieur, le diner est servi.”
In his eyes there was not only tenderness but a somewhat emphasized affection, as though he meant to demonstrate, not only to them but to himself, that this new thing that had come to him did not touch their old relationship. For the new thing had come. He was still slightly dazed with the knowledge of it, and considerably anxious. Because he had just taken a glance at himself in the mirror of the walnut hat-rack, and had seen nothing there particularly to inspire—well, to inspire what he wanted to inspire.
At the foot of the stairs he drew Lucy's arm through his, and held her hand. She seemed very small and frail beside him.
“Some day,” he said, “a strong wind will come along and carry off Mrs. Lucy Crosby, and the Doctors Livingstone will be obliged hurriedly to rent aeroplanes, and to search for her at various elevations!”
David sat down and picked up the old fashioned carving knife.
“Get the clubs?” he inquired.
Dick looked almost stricken.
“I forgot them, David,” he said guiltily. “Jim Wheeler went out to look them up, and I—I'll go back after dinner.”
It was sometime later in the meal that Dick looked up from his plate and said:
“I'd like to cut office hours on Wednesday night, David. I've asked Elizabeth Wheeler to go into town to the theater.”
“What about the baby at the Homer place?”
“Not due until Sunday. I'll leave my seat number at the box office, anyhow.”
“What are you going to see, Dick?” Mrs. Crosby asked. “Will you have some dumplings?”
“I will, but David shouldn't. Too much starch. Why, it's 'The Valley,' I think. An actress named Carlysle, Beverly Carlysle, is starring in it.”
He ate on, his mind not on his food, but back in the white house on Palmer Lane, and a girl. Lucy Crosby, fork in air, stared at him, and then glanced at David.
But David did not look up from his plate.
III
The Wheeler house was good, modern and commonplace. Walter Wheeler and his wife were like the house. Just as here and there among the furniture there was a fine thing, an antique highboy, a Sheraton sideboard or some old cut glass, so they had, with a certain mediocrity their own outstanding virtues. They liked music, believed in the home as the unit of the nation, put happiness before undue ambition, and had devoted their lives to their children.
For many years their lives had centered about the children. For years they had held anxious conclave about whooping cough, about small early disobediences, later about Sunday tennis. They stood united to protect the children against disease, trouble and eternity.
Now that the children were no longer children, they were sometimes lonely and still apprehensive. They feared motor car accidents, and Walter Wheeler had withstood the appeals of Jim for a half dozen years. They feared trains for them, and journeys, and unhappy marriages, and hid their fears from each other. Their nightly prayers were “to keep them safe and happy.”
But they saw life reaching out and taking them, one by one. They saw them still as children, but as children determined to bear their own burdens. Jim stayed out late sometimes, and considered his manhood in question if interrogated. Nina was married and out of the home, but there loomed before them the possibility of maternity and its dangers for her. There remained only Elizabeth, and on her they lavished the care formerly divided among the three.
It was their intention and determination that she should never know trouble. She was tenderer than the others, more docile and gentle. They saw her, not as a healthy, normal girl, but as something fragile and very precious.
Nina was different. They had always worried a little about Nina, although they had never put their anxiety to each other. Nina had always overrun
