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.” But they assumed a certain lightness after that, each to cheer the other. As when she asserted that she was sure she would always know the moment he stopped thinking about her, and he stopped, with any number of people about, and said: “That's simply terrible! Suppose, when we are married, my mind turns on such a mundane thing as beefsteak and onions? Will you simply walk out on me?” He stood on the lowest step of the train until her figure was lost in the darkness, and the porter expostulated. He was, that night, a little drunk with love, and he did not read the note she had thrust into his hand at the last moment until he was safely in his berth, his long figure stretched diagonally to find the length it needed. “Darling, darling Dick,” she had written. “I wonder so often how you can care for me, or what I have done to deserve you. And I cannot write how I feel, just as I cannot say it. But, Dick dear, I have such a terrible fear of losing you, and you are my life now. You will be careful and not run any risks, won't you? And just remember this always. Wherever you are and wherever I am, I am thinking of you and waiting for you.” He read it three times, until he knew it by heart, and he slept with it in the pocket of his pajama coat.