The Breaking Point

As he left he was aware that she stood in the doorway looking after

him. He drove home slowly in the car, and on the way he made up a kindly

story to tell the family. He could not let them know that Jim had been

seeking love in the byways of life. And that night he mailed a check in

payment of the undertaker's bill, carefully leaving the stub empty.

On the third day after Jim's funeral he started for Norada. An interne

from a local hospital, having newly finished his service there, had

agreed to take over his work for a time. But Dick was faintly jealous

when he installed Doctor Reynolds in his office, and turned him over to

a mystified Minnie to look after.

"Is he going to sleep in your bed?" she demanded belligerently.

She was only partially mollified when she found Doctor Reynolds was to

have the spare room. She did not like the way things were going, she

confided to Mike. Why wasn't she to let on to Mrs. Crosby that Doctor

Dick had gone away? Or to the old doctor? Both of them away, and that

little upstart in the office ready to steal their patients and hang out

his own sign the moment they got back!

Unused to duplicity as he was, Dick found himself floundering along an

extremely crooked path. He wrote a half dozen pleasant, non-committal

letters to David and Lucy, spending an inordinate time on them, and

gave them to Walter Wheeler to mail at stated intervals. But his chief

difficulty was with Elizabeth. Perhaps he would have told her; there

were times when he had to fight his desire to have her share his anxiety

as well as know the truth about him. But she was already carrying the

burden of Jim's tragedy, and her father, too, was insistent that she be

kept in ignorance.

"Until she can have the whole thing," he said, with the new heaviness

which had crept into his voice.

Beside that real trouble Dick's looked dim and nebulous. Other things

could be set right; there was always a fighting chance. It was only

death that was final.

Elizabeth went to the station to see him off, a small slim thing in

a black frock, with eyes that persistently sought his face, and a

determined smile. He pulled her arm through his, so he might hold her

hand, and when he found that she was wearing her ring he drew her even

closer, with a wave of passionate possession.

"You are mine. My little girl."

"I am yours. For ever and ever."