“All right,” she said, and prepared to depart. “I won't. But you might just find out from your friend Mrs. Sayre who it was she saw in Chicago this week.” It was in this manner, bit by bit and each bit trivial, that the case against Dick was built up for Elizabeth. Mrs. Sayre, helpless before her quiet questioning, had to acknowledge one damning thing after another. He had known her; he had not asked for Elizabeth, but only for David; he looked tired and thin, but well. She stood at the window watching Elizabeth go down the hill, with a feeling that she had just seen something die before her. XXXVIII On the night Bassett and Harrison Miller were to return from Chicago Lucy sat downstairs in her sitting-room waiting for news. At ten o'clock, according to her custom, she went up to see that David was comfortable for the night, and to read him that prayer for the absent with which he always closed his day of waiting. But before she went she stopped before the old mirror in the hall, to see if she wore any visible sign of tension. The door into Dick's office was open, and on his once neat desk there lay a litter of papers and letters. She sighed and went up the stairs. David lay propped up in his walnut bed. An incredibly wasted and old David; the hands on the log-cabin quilt which their mother had made were old hands, and tired. Sometimes Lucy, with a frightened gasp, would fear that David's waiting now was not all for Dick. That he was waiting for peace. There had been something new in David lately. She thought it was fear. Always he had been so sure of himself; he had made his experiment in a man's soul, and whatever the result he had been ready to face his Creator with it. But he had lost courage. He had tampered with the things that were to be and not he, but Dick, was paying for that awful audacity. Once, picking up his prayer-book to read evening prayer as was her custom now, it had opened at a verse marked with an uneven line: “I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son.” That had frightened her David's eyes followed her about the room. “I've got an idea you're keeping something from me, Lucy.” “I? Why should I do that?” “Then where's Harrison?” he demanded, querulously. She told him one of the few white lies of her life when she said: “He hasn't been well. He'll be over to-morrow.” She sat down and picked up the prayer-book, only to find him lifting himself in the bed and listening. “Somebody closed the hall door, Lucy. If it's Reynolds, I want to see him.” She got up and went to the head of the stairs. The light was low in the hall beneath, and she saw a man standing there. But she still wore her reading glasses, and she saw at first hardly more than a figure. “Is that you, Doctor Reynolds?” she asked, in her high old voice.