Rachel merely shook her head slowly as she tried to connect, in an impersonal sort of way, the notion of tragedy with John--John the successful, the obstinate, the simple in desire, the objective. There had been no real disappointment in all his life. She looked back half-indignantly at David, rejecting the suggestion. David rose and took a turn up and down the parlor again, pausing in the shadows at the farther end of the room. Then he came back to his seat and faced her determinedly. 'What _I_ had always hoped was that you would come to understand John without any outside interference. I came back over and over to see, but I always kept from butting in.' He paused again. 'I wouldn't say anything now, only your tone, your "Poor John" way, shows you are just the same as ever. I won't have him buried without your knowing something more about him--if I can show you,' he added more gently. 'Please tell me,' said Rachel quietly. Her mind was still half as much on David as on what he was going to say. 'There is nothing to tell that you should not have seen for yourself. You were his wife and you lived with him. From the time you came to this house one side of John's life ended. In a way he had no home and no--wife. A man wants a companion.' Rachel almost spoke, in startled contradiction. It was she who had been uncompanioned. 'You were proud, I know, of never finding fault with John. Don't you know that he would have been glad if you had openly found fault with him? As it was, it seemed as if you thought him hopeless. When he said things about the house or anything in it, he really wanted you to contradict him and argue with him, and give him a way to come to the same place where you were--don't you see?' 'Did he tell you?' 'No. But of course I used to sit round with him a good deal. And I had always been used to understanding him,' he added, with a drop in his voice. 'John had a lot of imagination,' he went on. Rachel looked up in real surprise. 'I could see every year how the house was getting more on his nerves. Sometimes when he was feeling it more than usual he would say little things that I understood. For him it was like living with some one who didn't want him round. But he might have liked it.' 'You don't understand,' said Rachel, as if pricked into coming to her own defense. 'John didn't like the way the house came to us in the first place. You didn't know--' 'Yes, I did,' he responded as she hesitated, 'I found out.' 'And yet,' she went on, 'we used the house and the money--' 'You haven't known much about the business for several years, have you? Of course you do know that the house has been in your name from the beginning, almost. But you don't know that the few thousands Richard Hughes left have been invested for you ever since two years after he died. It crippled John for a while after he took it out of the business. But he always took good care of that money--it amounts to quite a little now.'