"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.




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